EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION.

Recently, while sitting in my doctor's office in a small town in southeastern Virginia, I heard a familiar melody floating through the air over the Muzak system. For a few moments I could not identify the tune, wrapped in lush chords and decorated with rippling arpeggios by a pianist whose main influences seemed to be (improbable though it sounds) Erroll Garner and Liberace. Then it dawned on me that I was listening to "Ruby, My Dear," one of Thelonious Monk's most poignant ballads, in a version that had been sweetened with saccharine, its dissonant twists and turns smothered by a rich glaze of post-Romantic harmonies. This "Ruby" was aimed at the "adult contemporary" or "easy listening" market--for Sly Stone's everyday people waiting for appointments, wandering through malls, or commuting on freeways. Even though the slick makeover took the tune far away from the spirit of the original, I was glad to encounter Monk's music "out there" in America, just as I had been startled and pleased last year in a San Francisco coffee shop to hear "Epistrophy" in a high-energy cover by the jazz-fusion band T J. Kirk.

Monk's music is out there, all right. A core group of standards--including "'Round Midnight," "Straight, No Chaser," "Well, You Needn't," and "Blue Monk"--makes up the repertory of every working jazz musician. In the past few years, Monk "tribute discs" have been released by pianists Danilo Perez, Fred Hersch, and Jessica Williams; trumpeter Wynton Marsalis; saxophonist Dave Liebman; arranger-band-leader Bill Holman; former Police guitarist Andy Summers; and drummer T. S. Monk, who assembled an all-star cast to record his father's music (Monk on Monk, N2K Encoded Music N2KE-10017). Monk's own recordings, meanwhile, continue to turn up newly repackaged on compact disc, often including previously unissued material. There are Monk web sites, CD-ROMs, and online discussion groups. And there is the Thelonious Monk Institute, an organization that sponsors competitions for emerging artists and promotes jazz education in different cities across the United States. Monk's legacy, in sum, is firmly established, and his music circulates more widely in contemporary culture than it ever did during his lifetime.

Curiously, given his elevated status as a jazz composer and performer, Monk has until now received little attention from scholars. Several biographical works aimed at a general audience have appeared in recent years, together with a few articles by music theorists and cultural historians (for example, Koch 1983; Richter 1995; Haywood 1996; Kurzdorfer 1997). Still to come, though, at the time of this writing, are such basic texts as a substantial critical biography (in English) or a monograph exploring Monk's music in depth. To date, Monk has made a far greater impact on poets, essayists, and creative writers than academicians. Sascha Feinstein's poem "Misterioso," published here in its entirety for the first time, provides but one example of the many literary responses that Monk has provoked over the years (see also Etter 1975; Lange 1977; Early 1989; Feinstein and Komunyakaa 1991; Lange and Mackey 1993; Dyer 1996; Feinstein 1997; Feinstein and Komunyakaa 1996). There is even a whimsical children's book (Raschka 1997) that graphically depicts--through repeated phrases, multi-hued grid patterns, and a sense of spatial play--the agreeably topsy-turvy experience of listening to Monk. What is there about Monk's music that inspires such creative work? Does it possess intrinsic qualities that resist conventional modes of Western analysis and explication?

This issue of Black Music Research Journal, offering fresh views on Monk by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, suggests that we are moving forward into a new era of Monk studies. Four of the contributors presently are working on book-length projects in which Monk figures either as the main subject (Kelley, Tucker, and van der Bliek) or a primary player (Monson). A fifth, Sascha Feinstein, edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature,(1) which not only takes its title from a composition by Monk but regularly features writing about him, such as Amiri Baraka's "A Monk Story" (Baraka 1997). Another work titled Brilliant Corners, currently in preparation by British jazz historian Chris Sheridan, is a comprehensive bio-discography. This activity follows the unprecedented events of 1997, when, after long inactivity on the Monk publishing front, there suddenly appeared three English-language books devoted to him (Fitterling, De Wilde, and Gourse, although the first two of these had been issued earlier in German and French editions, respectively). Slowly but surely, Monk is moving into the mainstream of critical and scholarly discourse about jazz. To give a sense of where the field of Monk studies has been and where it is heading, Rob van der Bliek provides here "A Selection of Monk Sources," drawing upon a thorough review of the literature undertaken for his work-in-progress, The Thelonious Monk Reader.

The current scholarly "mainstreaming" of Monk resembles what happened to his music in the latter half of the 1950s and the early 1960s, as the enigmatic pianist-composer--who enjoyed a cult-like following among musicians and a small group of aficionados--moved from semiobscurity into the bright light of public attention and critical acclaim. Two articles in this issue address this crucial phase of Monk's career: cultural historian Robin D. G. Kelley considers Monk's relationship (musical, personal, aesthetic, and ideological) with the younger avant-garde players who were emerging on the scene just as Monk was reaching his peak period of popularity; and my article about the 1955 Riverside album Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington argues that jazz-historical forces and marketing strategies came together to push Monk inexorably into the jazz "mainstream," even though he reacted by paddling upstream against the current.

The composite portrait of Monk drawn by other articles in this issue displays striking features previously overlooked by writers. Music historian Scott DeVeaux turns the focus away from the innovative, modernist composer toward the pianist whose active repertory included Tin Pan Alley standards and sentimental pop ballads. In the course of his analysis, DeVeaux traces lines of connection between an older body of American popular song and Monk's seemingly idiosyncratic harmonic practice, discovering kinship between "experimental" bebop and "commercial" Tin Pan Alley rather than the mutual antagonism often depicted in the literature on jazz. Ethnomusicologist and historian Ingrid Monson documents Monk's participation in civil rights benefit concerts in the 1960s, revealing him to be not the apolitical introvert of popular lore but an artist who lent his talents to activist causes and on occasion voiced strong opinions on the subject of the African-American freedom struggle. Jazz film scholar Krin Gabbard discusses the shifting images of Monk offered by recent documentaries, suggesting that although aspects of his persona come across vividly in these cinematic representations, in other ways Monk manages to elude and subvert filmmakers in their efforts to capture him on screen for the viewing public.

The five articles in this issue were presented, in different form, as papers at "Brilliant Corners: A Symposium Celebrating Thelonious Monk," held February 27, 1998, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That symposium, which I was invited to help organize, took place under the auspices of the 1998 Carolina Jazz Festival and was supported in part by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council. For their roles in putting on the events that spawned this special Monk issue of Black Music Research Journal, I wish to thank James Ketch and Annette Wright, directors of the Carolina Jazz Festival, and Gerald Horne, director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center. Thanks also to the authors, who promptly revised their papers; to Sascha Feinstein for granting permission to publish "Misterioso"; and to Rob van der Bliek for cheerfully agreeing to compile "A Selection of Monk Sources."

(1.) For subscription information, contact Brilliant Corners, Lycoming College, Williamsport, PA 17701.

REFERENCES

Baraka, Amiri. 1997. A Monk story. Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature 1, no. 2 (Summer): 57-60.

De Wilde, Laurent. 1997. Monk. Translated by Jonathan Dickson. New York: Marlow and Company.

Dyer, Geoff. 1996. But beautiful: A book about jazz. New York: North Point Press.

Early, Gerald. 1989. Play without ceasing: Thelonious Monk and Earl Hines; The passing of jazz's old guard: Remembering Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Stitt. In Tuxedo junction: Essays on American culture, 307-323. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press.

Etter, Dave. 1975. Well, you needn't: The Thelonious Monk poems. Independence, Mo.: Raindust.

Feinstein, Sascha. 1997. Epistrophies: Poems celebrating Thelonious Monk and his music. African American Review 31, no. 1 (Spring): 55-59.

Feinstein, Sascha, and Yusef Komunyakaa, eds. 1991. The jazz poetry anthology. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

--. 1996. The second set: The jazz poetry anthology. Vol. 2. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

Fitterling, Thomas. 1997. Thelonious Monk: His life and music. Translated by Robert Dobbin. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Hill Books.

Gourse, Leslie. 1997. Straight, no chaser: The life and genius of Thelonious Monk. New York: Schirmer.

Haywood, Mark S. 1996. Rhythmic readings in Thelonious Monk. In Annual review of jazz studies 7, 1994-95, edited by Edward Berger, David A. Cayer, Henry Martin, Dan Morgenstern, and Lewis Porter, 25-45. Lanham, Md.: Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers and Scarecrow Press.

Koch, Lawrence O. 1983. Thelonious Monk: Compositional techniques. In Annual review of jazz studies 2, edited by Dan Morgenstern, Charles Nanry, and David A. Cayer, 67-80. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.

Kurzdorfer, James. 1997. Outrageous clusters: Dissonant semitonal cells in the music of Thelonious Monk. In Annual review of jazz studies 8, 1996, edited by Henry Martin, 181-201. Lanham, Md.: Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers and Scarecrow Press.

Lange, Art. 1977. The Monk poems. New York: Frontward.

Lange, Art, and Nathaniel Mackey, eds. 1993. Moment's notice: Jazz in poetry and prose. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.

Raschka, Chris. 1997. Mysterious Thelonious. New York: Orchard Books.

Richter, Stephen. 1995. The beauty of building, dwelling, and Monk: Aesthetics, religion, and the architectural qualities of jazz. African American Review 29, no. 2: 259-268.