The Bigger Picture

T. Monk’s Advice (1960)

by Bob Moses

Last week, an ecstatic e-mail appeared in my inbox carrying an image of what was purported to be sage words from the hand of Thelonious Monk.

A mixture of bebop koans and hard-knocks advice, it sure sounded like Monk:

“Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.”
“You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?”
“Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by.”

The image is of a wire-bound notebook page, titled “T. Monk’s Advice (1960),” and the two pages are scrawled quickly and underlined emphatically. The message proved irresistible for musicians. I received e-mails and image three or four times in the next few days. I checked with Don Fleming: he had received it four times over the weekend. Every time I saw it, the sender always maintained they got it from a great, long-time, well-known, etc., musician, so the source also lent credibility.
The notebook pages
Google turned up a Flickr image but no provenance. Blog references started turning up from all over the country. But what was this digital echo of Monk’s voice? From the exhortations (“Let’s lift the bandstand!!”) and diagrammatic references to Monk, a closer look indicates the notebook probably belonged to a member of a Monk ensemble. I asked Holly Anderson to trace back the route the e-mail took to her: it led in a few steps to Geoff Muldaur and vanished. Then her friend Joe Dizney pointed to Steve Lacy, a source later confirmed by no less encyclopedic a musical authority than Mike Watt.

The timing makes perfect sense, as Steve Lacy appeared with Monk’s band briefly in 1960. Though only in his mid-20s, Lacy had already worked with Gil Evans and Mal Waldron, after having his eyes opened by Cecil Taylor and working in Taylor’s band from 1955-57. But the notebook indelibly captures a young man trying to absorb the words of the master who would preoccupy him for the next five years, even forming an ensemble with Roswell Rudd to interpret Monk’s work. Lacy, of course, moved quickly on to establish his preeminence on the soprano sax in adventurous, experimental music for the next 40 years.

The image clearly resonated with musicians beyond the realm of free-jazz players or historians. Why? The message is universal for anyone who ever stepped in front of an audience with instrument in hand, from the tart instruction of a demanding bandleader (“Don’t play the piano part. I’m playing that. Don’t listen to me, I’m supposed to be accompanying you.”), to the reminder to reach for more (“A genius is the one most like himself.”). I still haven’t discovered who posted the image, but they’ve provided lots of musicians a provocative, reflective moment.

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