Felonious Monk
“Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy.”
– Thelonious Monk
Suggested listening:
Thelonious Monk
“Monk’s Mood”
Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane
“Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane” (album)
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk
“Bird & Diz” (album)
(Note that Monk doesn’t appear on the cuts “Passport” or “Visa”)
The Teagarden Boys & Trumbauer Swing Band
“I’se a Muggin’”
Suggested Viewing:
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
(Documentary film, English with Italian subtitles)
Originally published on Instagram
October 10, 2022
If this looks like a Christian counterpoint to my previous post, it’s merely a coincidence of timing. The Church certainly has a lot to answer for where the brutal imposition of religious “morality” goes — from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the kidnapping and forced conversion of indigenous children — but this post is a gag birthday card to the great bebop pianist Thelonious Monk.
Why is he holding a pistol?
For the sake of the pun, firstly. But there’s an etymological angle too.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines bebop as:
“A type of jazz originating in the 1940s and characterized by complex harmony and rhythms. It’s associated particularly with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie.”
It’s a small-combo artform that stole elements of the wildly popular swing music of the 1920s and ‘30s, then turned those elements inside out and effectively killed off the big bands of the day.
Nobody knows who first applied the name to the genre (Parker, Monk and Gillespie all claimed responsibility), but it’s agreed that the word originated at least as early as the 1920s in the nonsense onomatopoeia of scat singing. One of the earliest known recorded examples is the 1936 “Stuff” Smith song, “I’se a Muggin’” by The Teagarden Boys & Trumbauer Swing Band.
In the song, the word ‘mugging’ is used as jargon to describe improvised music — or jamming — which is really all the song is about. But jazz musicians of the 1930s also used ‘mug’ in the same sense we do today — “to make exaggerated facial expressions for an audience or a camera” — and it’s pretty clear when listening to the song that the musicians have this meaning in mind as well. This sense of the word is theatrical slang from the 1880s; it derives from the noun ‘mug’ — meaning “mouth” or “face” (as in ‘mugshot’) — which is thought to have its origins in 17th-century English drinking mugs adorned with grotesque or foolish faces.
Those same faces also inspired street criminals in the 1800s to refer to their victims as “mugs,” and this is where we get the word for the crime of mugging.
So here’s Felonious Monk.
He’s a-muggin’.
Who is he mugging? If I had to guess, I’d say probably Jack Teagarden, the trombone player and vocalist scatting “bebop” in the big-band era just before Monk and his small-band co-conspirators appropriate the word.
Thelonious Monk was born on October 10, 1917.
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