Thelonious Monk - 'Satin Doll'

Thelonious Sphere Monk is a household god here. A brilliant black-and-white photographic portrait of the man by Lee Tanner sits at eye level by my desk. It serves to remind me that tunes like 'Little Rootie Tootie', 'Nutty', 'Ruby My Dear', 'Coming On The Hudson', 'Ugly Beauty' or any number of his gloriously idiosyncratic compositions work faster on depression than any medication.

I first saw him in black and white on BBC television: watching with my dad this strange man in a strange hat, who shuffled around on his piano stool while striking the keys as if subjugating the notes he played. Bending the notes to his will. Neither of us understood him or his off-centred music, but his eccentricities made us chuckle and even at an early age I could see that there was something rather special about him.

Certainly, thus thought the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who heard Monk on record playing his masterpiece, 'Round Midnight', when she dropped in to see her friend, the pianist Teddy Wilson. She was en route for New York airport and her return trip home to her husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, and their five children. Reputedly, she was so hypnotised that she listened to it time after time – missing her flight and never going home again. She became the legendary 'Jazz Baroness', patron of the artists. She was evicted from the Stanhope hotel when Charlie Parker died in her suite. When she finally met Monk, she thought him the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She devoted nearly three decades of her life to him and Monk wrote 'Pannonica' in her honour, one of his most beautiful melodies. Nica, as she was known, took the rap for Monk when the police in Delaware found marijuana in her car because she feared that prison might finish him. And when his mental health disintegrated, Monk spent much of his last few years in her apartment – supposedly with three hundred or so of her cats.

Monk and his music have that kind of effect on people – well, maybe not quite so extreme, but an often profound one. As composers of jazz music, he and Duke Ellington are generally spoken of in the same breath. His music is immediately recognisable, utterly sui generis; it gets under your skin and stays there. It's quirky, angular, laconic and, to use the title of one of his own numbers, thoroughly 'off minor'. It can be dreamlike, unsettling, ominous, romantic and very beautiful. Fortunately, there's a whole heap of it available on YouTube because of his propensity to repeat himself in the later stages of his career. So intense was his creative flowering in the late '40s and throughout the '50s, that he had little more to say as a composer once he arrived at the 1960s – by which time his fame had spread around the world and the cameras were on call to capture it. Although he had plenty more to say as a jazz pianist, apart from the occasional masterpiece like 'Ugly Beauty', his regular working group of Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, bassist Larry Gales and drummer Ben Riley tended to improvise around a repertoire of classics from Monk's pre-Columbia label past. That and the work of other composers, which Monk played with such idiosyncratic feeling that, if you didn't know otherwise, you might believe that he himself had written numbers like 'Lulu's Back In Town', 'Honeysuckle Rose' and 'Tea For Two'.

Duke Ellington's compositions were a case in point. Our loveable pianist recorded Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington for Orrin Keepnews' Riverside label in 1956 after his tenure with Blue Note and then Prestige and during a period of his career when he lost his cabaret card and was unable to perform regularly in the major jazz nightclubs. 'Sophisticated Lady' was among the numbers chosen for the LP; 'Satin Doll' was not – which was partly why I plumped for the latter over the former at the head of my list of most suitable videos to illustrate what Monk was about. With its memorable melody and slightly angular rhythm, it seems tailor-made for him. Both songs come from the same solo performance at the Berlin Jazzstage in 1969 and, being solo piano with close-up camera work, they illustrate his highly individual technique arguably more clearly than the videos of the quartet at work.

So 'Satin Doll' shaded it: it's not his tune, but Monk plays it in such a way that it almost becomes his, distorting and refracting the song's harmonics in a way that tickles your funny bone. Looking like some exotic sculpture you might find in a garden presiding over a fishpond, and wearing the self-same smoking hat or whatever it is that he wears in Lee Tanner's photo, he treats you to three and a half minutes of fun-packed brio. I can't watch it without smiling and feeling better about the world and its glaring imperfections.

There will always be those – musicians included – who never 'get' Monk. People complained that what he played was out of tune or plain wrong and that he couldn't play the piano for peanuts. If you leave his 'weird' musical sensibility out of the equation, he would have been a very gifted technician. You can see on the video the way his left hand mirrors the kind of stride-piano techniques of Fats Waller, James P. Johnson and Willie 'The Lion' Smith in which Monk was steeped. Like, say, Duke Jordan who backed Charlie Parker on some of his earliest Bebop recordings, he would have earned respect as a straight man, but not adulation. In any case, far from being simplistic, an enlightening five-minute analysis of Monk's 'Bemsha Swing' by Ron Drotos explains exactly why his music was actually very difficult to play.

There's a nice little story told by Orrin Keepnews, Monk's boss at Riverside Records, which I find very revealing about the way a true artist's mind works. Monk was driving them back from the legendary Rudy Van Gelder's recording studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, when the car went into a skid on an icy road and ended up an inch or two from a telephone pole. Monk turned to Keepnews and told him 'It's a good thing I was driving. If it had been someone else, we might be dead.' His passenger didn't share Monk's conviction and chose never to ride with him again. It must have been the same unshakeable conviction that kept Monk ploughing the same furrow throughout his career despite all the setbacks and nay-sayers who suggested that he was wrong. Like Pablo Picasso and others of his kidney, Monk's extraordinary self-belief must have fuelled the magnetism that made the 'High Priest of Bebop' so irresistible to the 'Jazz Baroness' and his long-suffering wife, Nellie.

I rejected the other video contenders, as I've said, because they focus on the other members of the band as much as the man himself and therefore fail to illustrate quite so transparently his singular genius. If you want to check out Monk with his quartet, I would suggest 'Round Midnight' (of course) from 1966, in Poland; 'Nutty' (the title says it all), which must date from the same era, but where and when exactly, I know not; and 'Hackensack' (presumably named for Van Gelder's studio) from a 1965 recording for the BBC. Each one features a different hat. The last named might have been one of the performances I watched with my father before I really appreciated what jazz was all about.

One of the commentators writes 'Monk is great. Weird but great!' Indeed. My life for one would have been much poorer without the loneliest monk.

George Coleman Quartet - 'Amsterdam After Dark'

The number 89 has figured highly these last few days in my chunk of grey matter dedicated to jazz. The irreplaceable Wayne Shorter packed his tenor and soprano saxes for the ultimate trip on the 2^nd March, 2023. And 'Big George' Coleman is celebrating his 89^th birthday with a residence at the Smoke club in New York. My man in Manhattan tells me that he saw George's quartet not long ago at Smalls. It could have been this very concert. The great man apparently had to remain seated for most of the time, but he still sounded good. For such a big man, he has always had the kind of lightness and delicacy of tone that has long made him one of my favourite tenor saxophonists. In a short masterclass video, he talks of how you don't have to squawk and wail, 'you play something really crisp and clean', the hallmark of his long career.

I looked initially for a video from 1989, but that would have been just too darn neat. I was very tempted by a long video of Coleman's octet, especially as the pianist was his fellow Memphis musician, Harold Mabern, who was featured last time out in the company of Lee Morgan. But the tenor solo time is devoted to Sal Nistico rather than Big George. Besides, rather too much time is allocated to Billy Higgins' drum solo and, with the performance clocking in at 15 minutes, viewers might find their patience wearing thin.

For much of his career, though, George Coleman led his own quartet, so what more appropriate than this particular appearance in the last of four editions of Scottish Television's The Jazz Series? And who more appropriate to introduce it than Ronnie Scott, at whose club George Coleman played on several occasions, recording a 'damn fine' live album (Playing Changes) in 1979 with almost the same personnel as here in 1981? Herbie Lewis stands in for the rotund Ray Drummond. 'Smilin' Billy' Higgins is the drummer once more, this time treating us to a brief, educated solo. The pianist is one of the great Latin jazz keyboard masters, who was equally at home in a pure jazz context. Hilton Ruiz died freakishly and tragically prematurely when he fell on the street in New Orleans, having gone to the city to take part in a video to promote a recording in aid of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I was lucky enough to see him play on three occasions, the first as part of the New York All Stars at the 1986 North Sea Jazz Festival in Den Haag, playing with such funky fire and graceful ease that he knocked me off my feet – even though I was seated. Alas, his is only an abbreviated solo, which is why this live version doesn't quite scale the heights of the recorded one, the title track of Coleman's splendid Amsterdam After Dark for Timeless in 1979. Nevertheless, the video's still a ripper and it provides a precious glimpse of the saxophonist playing probably his finest composition live.

George Coleman's career has been long and varied, without ever scaling the heights commensurate with his talent. It's probably typified by his brief time with Miles Davis as the bridge between John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, gracing some live recordings and a kind of stop-gap studio album, Seven Steps To Heaven. He was briefly with Max Roach's famous group of the 1950s and, like many others, recorded with Lee Morgan. He may not be quite up at the same level as Sonny Rollins, 92 at time of writing and still going strong, in the pantheon of jazz tenor saxophonists, but few can boast a career of seventy-plus years, and few earned the approval of such a hard and demanding boss as Miles Davis, who said of him that 'George played almost everything perfectly.' He was indeed 'a hell of a musician.'