Thelonious Monk and the jazz of youth work

Mark Krueger

The other evening looking for something to do out of town, I went to a lecture about Thelonious Monk at Indiana University’s Black Culture Center. David Baker, chair of the Jazz Studies department gave the lecture. An experienced jazz musician, he had played with and knew many of the jazz greats. Baker was accompanied by a jazz combo that played a few of Monk’s compositions including Blue Monk, one of my favorites. The presentation was conducted in an improvised conversation with the leader of the combo, a pianist, and the audience.

I am not a musician or a jazz expert but I do consider jazz to be the music of my youth, and my work with youth. No other form of music seems to resonate more with the way I hear the rhythms of those times. Often I have written about how youth work is like a modern dance that is improvised according to the rhythms of daily interactions and youth’s developmental readiness and capacity to participate. In addition to being very knowledgeable and skilled, the most competent workers seem to have the capacity to improvise as they move in and out of synch with youth’s developmental rhythms for trusting and growing.

Like the master youth workers, Monk was a true original. He influenced a generation of jazz musicians with his unpredictable, completely innovative riffs and melodies. According to Baker, you never knew where Monk was going but you wanted to go along. His playing had a sense of anticipation. If you played with Monk, as Baker did, you knew something new and fresh would happen and therefore you tried to keep up, which required a fair amount of technical skill. You wanted to be in the group, in other words, creating with him, because you knew or sensed something would occur that would make you a better musician.

When the combo played Blue Monk, I was immediately connected to a familiar melody, and when the work moved away I waited to for a new connection. I felt as if I was home away from home. So it was in youth work as well. There was a certain sense of sound, rhythm and pace in moments of connection, discovery, and empowerment that was imbedded with any number of positive associations with and for the youth. They, of course, remembered these moments with their own Blue Monks.

According to Baker melody was the key to Monk’s work, even as he seemed to move off in a non- melodic direction. His compositions and improvisations were full of dissonant harmonies and angular melodic twists. His approach to playing piano combined a strong percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of silences and hesitations. He was noted for his “hip" style in suits, hats and sunglasses. At times, while the other musicians in the band continued playing, he would stop, stand up from the keyboard and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano. When asked why he did this, Baker replied he liked to dance and wanted to stay busy when it wasn’t his turn to play.

For me Monk’s work shows itself in fragments and images that create both a visual and audio composition that sticks. I remember a Monk experience as I remembered a Miles Davis experience when he put his head down over his trumpet and turned his back to the audience lost in the music. More than Davis however, Monk, seemed to use movement the way philosopher Foucault did to stimulate new thought and action. And when he sat down again he was ready to go with something fresh and new, to take the group off in a totally unexpected direction. You have to see and hear it I guess to understand. I assume the Child and Youth Care dancers out there get the gist of what I am saying and can make comparisons with their work, as I do.

In my Child and Youth Care classes at the university, we spend time discussing rhythmic interaction as a phenomenon that forges human connection. To demonstrate we line up and pass through like modern dancers. We also play catch, and sometimes we play drums or move to guitar music. A while ago I sat in a drum circle with youth in a group home, and tried to replicate this on table tops in class. Three on three basketball evokes for me a sense of improvised rhythmic interaction. So does paddling a canoe or stirring a pot together. We read youth work articles on rhythmic interaction and stories of days when workers struggle and search for harmony. Two years ago I gave a speech at the University of Victoria. While I tried to read a poem describing the central themes in competent youth work (humbly like Leonard Cohen) graduate students danced to the rhythms of African drums played by another graduate student. Next time I will try to bring a little Monk into the discussion.

I could not help but think throughout the evening that I was learning postmodern youth work through another form. Monk made meaning from his music the way youth made meaning from their experiences. He moved, played, and performed according to what he heard inside and saw outside. As an African American musician and poor child and man, Monk had a very difficult life. Fortunately he was resilient and found his passion and stayed with it besides being denied access to many of the venues and accolades that other musicians received. A generous man, he made something unique of himself, and shared it with others.

At one point Baker said children had their own jazz rhythms within them and it was important not to suppress these instincts. He shared the example of how the daughter of one of the members of the combo had shared a riff with him before the lecture. He wanted her to demonstrate for the audience but she was a little shy, the timing was off. A good, caring youth worker of sorts, he went with the flow and transitioned to the next topic, not wanting to embarrass or force her into something when she wasn’t ready.

A discussion at the end of the lecture debated whether or not Monk’s music, or any jazz for that matter, could be understood outside the cultural contexts from which it evolved. The scholars in the room seemed to agree that it could not. While I was not capable of debating this point, nor did I want to, I was certain that no matter who owned the music, it was the way I heard my youth and work with youth. When I said this to the audience, it was pleasant to see that several younger students nodded their heads in agreement. By coincidence, early in the day I had run into a young man who worked for us in Milwaukee ten or more years earlier in our transition living program for teens. I had lost track of him until then. He had become at teacher in the Black Cultural Center. Talk about chance encounters, connections, timing, transition, in-synch-ness, and harmonies. You have to be there to make it happen, right?