COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: When history is soft on the details
The music, God knows, was wonderful. But everything else about the gig was as bizarre as any jazz event I have ever witnessed.
In any event, Thelonious Monk’s 1965 appearance at the Royal Arms on West Utica was gloriously skewed. In between sets on opening night, the cornerstone jazz composer and pianist disappeared with his tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse into the back of the club. When both returned to the small Royal Arms bandstand for the evening’s second set, both were clearly in a chemically altered state.
Rouse, in fact, after the melody statement of the second set’s opener, sat down on the apron of the bandstand, leaned his head against the club’s wall and completely nodded off during Monk’s solo. When it was time for Rouse to play, he was still out like a light. Monk stopped playing completely, as he often did when it was his tenor saxophonist’s turn. He sat dead still at the piano, like a statue.
Drummer Ben Riley and bassist Larry Gales kept the rhythm going during Rouse’s short siesta. After a few bars of rhythmic churn, Riley called softly to the saxophonist but loud enough to be heard over his drums: “Charlie Rouse.” Nothing. A little louder next time while Riley kept a ching-chinga-ching cymbal ride going: “Charlie ROUSE.” Nada. Louder still next time: “CHARLIE ROUSE.” Rouse was still out. Finally, Riley issued a sharp wake up call accompanied by bass drum boom “CHARLIE ROUSE!”
Rouse rousted himself erect instantly and immediately began playing, almost in mid-phrase, as if he had been present and accounted for all along.
Here’s how the Royal Arms gig is treated by Robin G. D. Kelley in his extraordinary “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original” (Free Press, 589 pages, $30). “On May 24, [Baroness] Nica [DeKoenigswarter] drove them to Buffalo for a week-long engagement at the Royal Arms. They did make something of a vacation out of the trip by spending a day at Niagara Falls.”
Well, the decidedly chaotic engagement never came close to making it for a full week. Among other tales I’ve heard about later nights was one about Larry Gales’ bass slipping off the bandstand and cracking, resulting in a frantic phone call by an attendant fan to a Philharmonic bass player for a quick loaner.
It must be stressed that Kelley’s is a magnificent book—a detailed life of a great figure who has always deserved exactly this exhaustive, candid and sympathetic treatment.
But what I am slowly learning from being an eyewitness to history is how very much that history is altered by the elementary exigencies of getting it down—as Tom Cruise might put it, “the need for speed.” Kelley’s footnoted source for the account of the Royal Arms gig was a tiny Down Beat magazine item and was seemingly dependent on someone’s idea of publicity.
By the same token, a similarly extraordinary biography—Tracy Daugherty’s “Hiding Man” about writer Donald Barthelme—reports that Donald Barthelme’s teaching gigs in Buffalo were subsumed by a city characterized by town/gown conflicts. No one could possibly argue that area law enforcement and the university were often at odds in the late-’60s and early ’70s.
But Barthelme was the subject of several large, extravagantly admiring pieces in the city’s major newspaper (this one) and was with his family welcomed to stay in the homes of local arts patrons.
Again, that Daugherty biography of Barthelme is, in general, a great one. But away from main events, things are compressed into inaccuracy.
What I now wonder is this: If truly superb and scrupulous history gets little things so wrong, what about the big ones?
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