But Beautiful. Geoff Dyer

logic but which he made look completely ordinary – as though a ‘mollusk’ hat worn by Asian peasants were as essential an accessory to a suit as a collar and tie.

      —Did his hats have any effect on his playing?

      His face filled with a huge grin:

      —Nawh, haha. Well, I dunno. Maybe they do . . .

      When someone else was soloing he got up and did his dance. He started quietly, tapping a foot, clicking his fingers, then he raised his knees and elbows, rotating, shaking his head, meandering everywhere with his arms outstretched. Always looking like he was about to fall over. He spun around and around on the spot and then lurched back to the piano, giddy with purpose. People laughed when he was dancing and that was the most appropriate reaction as he shuffled around like a bear after its first taste of strong alcohol. He was a funny man, his music was funny, and most of what he said was a joke except he didn’t say much. His dancing was a way of conducting, finding a way into the music. He had to get inside a piece, till it was a part of him, internalize it, work himself into it like a drill biting into wood. Once he had buried himself in the song, knew it inside out, then he would play all around it, never inside it – but it always had that intimacy, that directness, because he was at the heart of it, he was in it. He didn’t play around the tune, he played around himself.

      —What is the purpose of your dancing, Mr Monk? Why do you do it?

      —Get tired of sitting at the piano.

      You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group – whatever the format – was his body. He didn’t play the piano really. His body was his instrument and the piano was just a means of getting the sound out of his body at the rate and in the quantities he wanted. If you blotted out everything except his body you would think he was playing the drums, foot going up and down on the hi-hat, arms reaching over each other. His body fills in all the gaps in the music; without seeing him it always sounds like something’s missing but when you see him even piano solos acquire a sound as full as a quartet’s. The eye hears what the ear misses.

      He could do anything and it seemed right. He’d reach into his pocket for a handkerchief, grab it, and play with just that hand, holding the handkerchief, mopping up notes that had spilled from the keyboard, wipe his face while keeping the melody with the other hand as though playing the piano came as easy to him as blowing his nose.

      —Mr Monk, how do you feel about the eighty-eight keys of the piano. Are they too many or too few?

      —Hard enough playing those eighty-eight.

      Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he’d never seen one before. Came at it from all angles, using his elbows, taking chops at it, rippling through the keys like they were a deck of cards, fingers jabbing at them like they were hot to the touch or tottering around them like a woman in heels – playing it all wrong as far as classical piano went. Everything came out crooked, at an angle, not as you expected. If he’d played Beethoven, sticking exactly to the score, just the way he hit the keys, the angle at which his fingers touched the ivory, would have unsteadied it, made it swing and turn around inside itself, made it a Monk tune. Played with his fingers splayed, flattened out over the keys, fingertips almost looking like they were pointed upward when they should have been arched.

      A journalist asked him about that, about the way he hit the keys.

      —Hit ’em any way I feel like.

      Technically he was a limited player in that there were all sorts of things he couldn’t do – but he could do everything he wanted to, it wasn’t that he was held back by his technique. Certainly no one else could play his music like he could (if you played the piano properly, there were all sorts of little things you couldn’t get at) and to that extent he had more technique than anyone. Equilibrium: he could think of nothing he wanted to do and couldn’t.

      He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to. Sometimes the song seemed to have turned inside out or to have been constructed entirely from mistakes. His hands were like two racquetball players trying to wrong-foot each other; he was always wrong-fingering himself. But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated. You always felt that at the heart of the tune was a beautiful melody that had come out back to front, the wrong way around. Listening to him was like watching someone fidget, you felt uncomfortable until you started doing it too.

      Sometimes his hands paused and changed direction in midair. Like he was playing chess, picking up a piece, moving it over the board, hesitating and then executing a different move from the one intended – an audacious move, one that seemed to leave his whole defence in ruins while contributing nothing to his attacking strategy. Until you realized that he’d redefined the game: the idea was to force the other person to win – if you won you lost, if you lost you won. This wasn’t whimsical – if you could play like this then the ordinary game became simpler. He’d got bored with playing straight-ahead bebop chess.

      Or you can look at it another way. If Monk had built a bridge he’d have taken away the bits that are considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts – but somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn’t there. It shouldn’t have held together but it did and the excitement came from the way that it looked like it might collapse at any moment just as Monk’s music always sounded like it might get wrapped up in itself.

      That’s what stopped it from being whimsical: nothing makes any difference with whimsy, whimsy is for low stakes. Monk was always playing for high stakes. He took risks and there are no risks in whimsy. People think of whimsy as doing whatever you feel like – but there’s less to whimsy than that. Monk did whatever he wanted, raised that to the level of an ordering principle with its own demands and its own logic.

      —See, jazz always had this thing, having your own sound so all sorts of people who maybe couldn’t have made it in other arts – they’d’ve had their idiosyncrasies ironed out – like if they were writers they’d not ’ve made it ’cause they couldn’t spell or punctuate or painting ’cause they couldn’t draw a straight line. Spelling and straight-line stuff don’t matter necessarily in jazz, so there’s a whole bunch of guys whose stories and thoughts are not like anyone else’s who wouldn’t’ve had a chance to express all the ideas and shit they had inside them without jazz. Cats who in any other walk of life wouldn’t’ve made it as bankers or plumbers even: in jazz they could be geniuses, without it they’d’ve been nothing. Jazz can see things, draw things out of people that painting or writing don’t see.

      He insisted his sidemen play his music the way he wanted but he wasn’t dependent on them the way Mingus was. Always it was Monk and the piano, that was really what the music was about. How well they knew his music mattered more to Monk than whether they were great soloists. His music came so natural to him that it baffled him, the idea that anyone could have trouble playing it. Unless he was demanding something beyond the physical possibilities of the instrument he assumed his sidemen should be able to play whatever he asked.

      —Once I complained that the runs he had asked for were impossible.

      —You mean they don’t give you a chance to breathe?

      —No, but . . .

      —Then you can play ’em.

      People were always telling him they couldn’t play things, but once he gave them a choice – You got an instrument? Well, you wanna play it or throw it away? – they found they could play. He made it seem stupid to be a musician and not be able to do things. Onstage he’d get up in the middle of playing something, walk over to one of the musicians, say something in his ear, sit down again and resume playing, never hurrying, wandering around the stage as his hands wandered around the tune. Everything he did was like that.

      —Stop