It is a great and common folly of man to build his practical and aesthetic house on a foundation of tangible content; only to watch it collapse in upon its self like a clumsily full pyramid of cards. This is the same predicament of many a failed romance; too much stock taken in the eloquent and earnest conversation, the tête-à-tête if you will, and far too much trepidation lumped upon silences. Many a moment of true beauty is curdled by a premature withdrawal due to a false epithet of an ‘awkward silence’. It is not the silence, which is cumbersome; it is the nervosa of the participants whom it falls upon! The measure of greatness from the realms of art to love and everything in between is how well the subject’s stands up to a comfortable and appropriated break in the rhythm. How many great songs are muddled by overcompensating an empty beat with a superfluous fill? What vast number of paintings would have benefited themselves by having one less brush stroke; one space left to show the rift that is the artists intention. The craft of silence must come as natural as the fact of being inclined to art itself. Thelonious Monk and Bob Kaufman are two artists who mastered, exemplified, and personified this facility.A son of North Carolina, Thelonious Sphere Monk’s family moved to New York City when he was five years old. After a childhood year of city life Monk began playing the piano under no formal tutelage. He didn’t graduate high school, although he was accepted into Peter Stuyvesant high school, one of Manhattans most sought after schools of the time. Rather, he played organ with a touring evangelist and faith healer. After two years on tour he dropped out and returned to New York City to form his own quartet, which played around at local bars and clubs. In the early 1940’s Monk started to work at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, where he began to fine tune his individual style of bebop jazz and develop his technique. Monk was highly improvisational in his works, hitting the keys like a poet boxer, naked on the stage. He’d weave moments are melancholy ballad-like tenderness, with hard hitting sudden movements like a drummer going wild on some 88 ivory snares. All of his compositions are marked by paced silences, some expected and some sudden, like a child driving a car for the first time and slamming on the breaks. That’s where the poetry is though; in those moments of reverie, between the lines. Intrinsically, jazz hinges on the hush at points in the composition to distinguish the remaining instrumental epochs of sound. This permits the songs rhythm and structure to have a more dynamic impact.
With a Jewish father, a Catholic Mother, and a voodoo practicing Grandmother, and thirteen siblings, New Orleans born Bob Garnell Kaufman was sure to be an interesting fellow. He joined the Merchant Marine for a stint when he was 18, then moved to New York City in the early 1940’s to study literature. It was there that he starting writing poetry and eventually got in with the Manhattan Beats. Kaufman married and became a Buddhist, as was the bohemian aesthetic tradition of the time. He based his poetry meter around the flow of jazz music, which he was a great fan of. He would write in a style that heavily used spaces and indentations to emphasize silences and pauses within his works. Massively improvisational, Kaufman rarely wrote down his poems, rather he viewed him self as an oral poet, his wife would jot them down franticly as he spewed them out in naturalistic spasms (Kaufman, Laughter Sounds…p.3). His style was a collage of many different school; surrealism, dada, religious, shamanistic, the new hard tone of the beats. All of this meshed upon the stop and go rhythm of the contemporary experimental jazz of the time. Kaufman even went as far as to name his son Parker, after Charlie Parker. Music was extremely important to him as an artist, he often read his works to the backing of a jazz band and even stated in Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman (Coffee House Press) “My head is a bony guitar, strung with tongues, plucked by fingers & nails.”
Monks hands were on fire, both of them. Many jazz pianists of time favored the mainstream style of a slow backing left hand with a wild eclectic right hand, Monk has a greater vision. He could blow through a composition at record speed, but he didn’t feel that he had to. He would distribute the notation equally between both left and right hands, not is a rush at all, rather he would periodically pause for an appropriate space or silence. This was a near foreign concept for beboppers at the time. Monk was a virtuoso who found no reason to flaunt it in superficial ways; he let his heart do the playing. This made the architecture melodies something nearly alien, prompting some to label him as experimental or avant-garde. He truly was not one for conventions. Monk once said, “Everything I play is different…different melody, different harmony, different structure. Each piece is different from the other…when the song tells a story, when it gets a certain sound, then it’s through…completed.” At the end of the 1940’s Monk got to make his first professional recordings with Blue Note. With greats such as Max Roach, Art Blakey, Louis Donaldson, and Nelson Boyd it was sure to be a break through success, however at the time, this was not the case. Songs which are staples of the jazz standard book now, were massive commercial failures when released in the early 1950’s. It was this failure that brought him to the narcotics use which eventually got him arrested and led to him loosing him cabaret card (something which was needed to perform live in any major club in the city). He was denied gigs left and right, which threw him into a depression, but also gave birth to his most creative period. With no live performances to occupy him, Monk began to compose vigorously in solitude, becoming increasingly more innovative and experimental. The quiet interludes in his songs became more punctuated with erratic bursts only to be following by longing melancholy silences. In the summer of 1954 he was invited to the Paris Jazz Festival to play. During this expatriate visit he recorded his first solo album. It was for Vogue and it was these recordings that begin to re-establish Monk as one of the times actual musical geniuses.
Bob Kaufman’s Poem “Unanimity Has Been Achieved Not a Dot Less for its Accidentalness” is a prime example of his infatuation and proclivity toward the jazz meter in his poetry works.
Raga of the drum, the drum, the drum, the drum, the drum, the heartbeat Raga of lip, raga of brass, raga of ultimate come with yesterday, raga of parched tongue-walked lip, raga of yellow, raga of mellow, raga of new, raga of old, raga of blue, raga of gold, raga of air spinning into itself. . . .
(Kaufman, Ancient Rain …p.16)
The indentations and extended spaces, the use of commas, ellipses, and repetitive near rhythmic onomatopoeia are almost like reading sheet music to Blue Monk or Straight, No Chaser. Kaufman often uses Jazz imagery, such as the shine of a saxophone or walk of a bass in his writing along with the already bop reminiscent format. In 1965 he published his most widely known work, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, which revealed Kaufman’s true inner self, a wide-eyed explorer and despondent prodigy. In France he was referred to as the American Arthur Rimbaud. (Clay, Jazz-Jail…p.76)
By the 1970’s Monk’s appearances and recordings were extremely seldom. A quote by Monk’s long time bassist and friend Al McKibbon, published in his obituary in the British newspaper The Independent stated that on The Giants of Jazz tour in 1971
“Monk said about two words. I mean literally maybe two words. He didn't say 'Good morning', 'Goodnight', 'What time?' Nothing. Why, I don't know. He sent word back after the tour was over that the reason he couldn't communicate or play was that Art Blakey and I were so ugly.” Other Jazz artists and long time friends of Monk reported on his silence over the years and after his death. The list includes Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Art Blakey, and John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk’s son, T.S. Monk, who is a Jazz drummer himself said that his father would become excited for two or three days at a time then fall totally silent and pace for days on end, becoming completely withdrawn from society. Time Magazine labeled him, “The Loneliest Monk.” (Gabbard, Evidence…documentary)
On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. When Bob Kaufman heard this he was outraged and swore to a Buddhist vow of silence, which lasted for ten years. He took his silence extremely serious. In 1973 the Vietnam War ended and so did Kaufman’s silence. He broke it by reciting a poem that he wrote, All Those Ships that Never Sailed, an ode to the victims of Vietnams long and pointless conflict. However, as the years past and Kaufman continued to be displeased with his countries actions, which he thought were counter productive to a final goal of peace. Becoming increasingly more grounded in the principles of Buddhism he resumed his vow silence in 1978. He very seldom broke it for the remainder of his life. He died in 1986. The great and hulking tragedy in this scenario is that Kaufman did not write down his poetry. He bled his words from his mouth into the air an audiences ears to catch, or his wife’s pen to puncture and weigh down onto the page. America lost more then a voice in the wake of Kaufman’s held-peace, they lost an institution. An oral poet who takes a vow of silence, this is a prime example of what Camus would call absurd.
Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter took Monk into her home for the final half decade of his life. The Baroness is the same woman who took the dying Charlie Parker in to usher him to the next life. Thelonious was almost completely silent during these final years, hardly ever taking visitors and barely saying a word to them when he did. He had a piano in his room where he slept, but he never played it. It was as if the silences in his compositions had come to a final and epic halt, pausing for greater and greater periods of time of the years, until the watch gears finally rusted still in the absence of their movement. (Spence, Thelonious…194)
In the work of both of these artists, their true meanings shined out not in pervasive literary and musical attacks, but rather in the beats between the content. To say something powerful is one thing, but to say something powerful in a powerful way is something great. Bob Kaufman and Thelonious Monk were so fully consumed by their aestheticisms that the form bled over into their lives. Existences stained with silence. Birds who sing beautiful song gag their mouths in protest or madness. Ernesto (Che) Guevara once said that “Silence is argument carried out by other means” It was with this same spirit that Monk and Kaufman sealed their lips. It’s the breaks that open up to the stillness and calmness that show us the absences, which exist within ourselves. When the piano and its backers dwindle down in Epistrophy or Round Midnight you can hear the breathing of the music’s heart, see the longing of jazzes very soul. It’s the eye of the storm, the interlude that makes you appreciate what is going on. A life is meaningless without reflection, this is the vocation of the artist; to reflect life, both what is in front of the mirror and what is not.
-Robert Kolodny
