Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song composed by Thelonious Monk
Performed by the Thelonious Monk Septet

I never knew how much I loved jazz until I heard Thelonious Monk. Growing up, the radio waves were saturated with pop music, either current or generational. Sure Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong sometimes appeared on television, but the radio was where the music was. In the pre-digital tuning days, every station that approached listen-ability became a notch in the memory to be treasured. No one played Monk or Coltrane or Parker, let alone Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker,… Herbie Hancock had to wait to cross over and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s popularity was a distant memory.

Sure, college brought a lot more music to my ears, but nothing like what happened when I moved to the big city. Maybe it was the Eighties, but everything suddenly played through the car stereo. And there was that sound, off-kilter, making you beg for the next handful of keys placed perfectly over the rhythm. The melodies repeated and changed and returned and held the ear. If there was so much to hear in this one song, then what else did this guy do? Was this what they meant by jazz? Who else plays like this? Or not like this (since no one did) but with as much thought and passion?

I had the privilege of seeing Dizzy Gillespie perform live twice before he died and both performances were stunning in the energy that he brought to the stage as well as the way that he could hold the audience in his hand. He was an extrovert on that stage. All the film that I have seen of Monk indicate the exact opposite to be his case. For better or worse, I must have known that before I ever saw those clips because I never envisioned myself in a crowd listening to Monk’s music. At most two or three of us sat around listening to the records, but mostly they were records to hear when you wanted to sit back and think and feel.

Crepuscule for Nellie must be the perfect tune for a smoky nightclub in Paris sometime after midnight when the first drinks are wearing off and it’s time to find an empty chair to rest a foot on. Monk wrote some of the greatest jazz songs, taking the magic of Ellington and Armstrong and so many others and running it through the prism that was his mind. I once thought it would be impossible for anyone to play those songs as well, but his art remains open to brilliant interpretation.

Art exists to prove us wrong. When we feel complacent, cocksure, or lazy, the best art calls to us and makes us reevaluate how we are spending our time, how we are thinking about the world around us, and where we see the boundaries of our lives. Crepuscule for Nellie felt like a message from an artist to a lonely young man telling him that there was more to life than he imagined in his petty philosophy. Perhaps it was time to leave that room.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 290 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

A scene in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle recounts the first time that Robert Benchley performed his magisterial comic monologue, The Treasurer’s Report. He repeated the performance many times in his life, including at least once for a movie short. His shorts were quite popular when people expected a cartoon, a newsreel, and other ephemera when they went to the cinema.

I have chosen to consider Benchley in my definition of “other” artists, but there’s the rub, he started as a writer, publishing numerous collections of short humor. Along with James Thurber, they charted the humor of American life in the first half of the twentieth century. While Thurber had a Midwestern looseness, Benchley had a more Eastern sense of the way things ought to be. In many of his pieces, he starts from a pronouncement of certain expectations which are subsequently dashed. Like S.J. Perelman and Thurber, Benchley does struggle in his relations with his spouse, though he does not quite see a forthcoming war between the sexes that Thurber illustrated. All three are afflicted by children, extended family, and pets, albeit accompanied by varying degrees of affection.

I discovered Benchley via the notorious Algonquin Round Table, a meeting place for the clever and artistic during the twenties in Manhattan. Harpo Marx frequented the group and I fell in love with the quiet Marx brother while a prepubescent because he expressed the perfect sentiment for every occasion. Parker, Benchley, and many others were regulars at the Round Table, literary knights tilting at the establishment. Fortunately, whatever book exposed me to the names of those in attendance contained excerpts from their writing, leading to months lost in the words of Parker, Benchley, and George Kaufman. A person could do worse than learn the best way to use the word horticulture in a sentence.

The modern exemplar of great humor short pieces is Woody Allen, though Ian Frazier, Paul Rudnick, George Saunders, and many others do brilliant work. Across all of them is a freedom of content and structure that well serves the particular piece. Thurber brought his drawings to the table also and those seemed to drive unusual flights of fancy. Famously, he documented the modern imagination at work in the common man. Benchley, on the other hand, seems almost trapped within a character that he found comfortable, the Everyman put upon by the world, yet a little too clever not to see the absurdity in whatever activity required his attention.

Even so, there is something more that I find so appealing. Beyond that character is one more person, the breaker of the fourth wall, the Robert Benchley portraying the character. That feels like the miracle of his humor. Compare the portrayal in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle of the Treasurer’s Report as done by an actor with that done by the real man. There is danger in that former that I wonder if Benchley would have countenanced. Naturely, it is a dramatic situation, but ultimately Benchley smiles at us from behind the curtain and says, “Surely, we have to laugh about this and then go around the corner for a good, stiff drink.”

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 291 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Book written by Miguel de Cervantes

Is it just the character, so artfully drawn? Hamlet… Faust, maybe… How many characters outside of religious texts have stayed in the common mind for the past four hundred years?

In the foreword to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote, Guy Davenport mentions that Don Quixote is one of those classics that everyone knows, but no one reads, even the occasional professor who teaches the book. I never read it in college, but I do have the excuse that it was never assigned. Much later in life, I decided to give it a spin, granting myself an out after the first section, assuming that it would be a slog.

Nabokov, in his lectures, struggles with much of the content that has been called humorous over the years. He found it beyond slapstick, edging well into cruelty. I can’t fault him his sensibilities (though some of his writings make the sentiment feel a bit disingenuous), but I must confess that I found parts of the book hilarious. This reaction hopefully removes me from the worst of Nabokov’s disdain, which was reserved for those who have sentimentalized Don Quixote over the centuries. That condemnation is something I can wholly endorse, even if the musical has its moments (but we all know that movies and musicals based on books are not the same thing as the book itself).

Make no mistake, the tale told by Cervantes is a march through the horrors man inflicts on his fellow man, 17th century-style, told with a heavy dose of satire about all things powerful at the time- all things being the church and the King. The first part of what we now consider one book was published as a single standalone release by Cervantes and it tells the tale most familiar of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, accompanied by Sancho Panza, on his doomed quest for nobility and true chivalrous love. The story ends with Quixote back home in bed, quite alive.

The book was successful beyond wildest dreams, leading to a variety of knock-off continuations of the story, as Cervantes was slow to recognize market demand and his publishers were slow to get the first book printed in other countries. Finally, Cervantes got a clue and wrote a sequel, even incorporating as a character one of the “Don Quixote”‘s from the most popular rip-off of his work. Accomplishing the task of skewering those who had stolen his copyright, all writers should be singing his praises as a morning ritual.

The sequel is now always packaged with the first part, but few are as familiar with it. I found it magnificent. Sancho Panza fulfills his life desire and becomes the governor of an island. The wisdom that Cervantes brings to bear makes the tale applicable to our own season of political discontent.

Multiple small brilliances fill the book, but the miracle is how strong the commentary on life rings throughout. Much like his contemporary in England, that Shakespeare fellow, Cervantes found a way to talk about life in a way that touched hearts so thoroughly in his time that the book became a necessary part of any library.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 292 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.