[A new documentary by Alain Gomis turns footage from an interview
with Thelonious Monk into a commentary on the submerged violence of
the star-making process.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THELONIUS MONK - THE FRAUGHT DANCE BETWEEN ARTIST AND INTERVIEWER IN
“REWIND & PLAY"  
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Harmony Holiday
March 18, 2023
The New Yorker
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_ A new documentary by Alain Gomis turns footage from an interview
with Thelonious Monk into a commentary on the submerged violence of
the star-making process. _

Thelonius Monk "Rewind and Play", Poster art for "Rewind and Play"

 

On the winter of 1969, at fifty-two years old and after decades of
revolutionizing the way we hear notes and silence, the jazz pianist
and composer Thelonious Monk
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invited to record a conversation and solo session for French
television. As the outtakes of the program reveal, the occasion
quickly devolved into a probe of Monk’s carefully protected private
life.

By this point in his career, it was commonplace to portray Monk as
stylistically bizarre. He and his music were often presented as
conjoined elements in a broken or stilted grammar of near-madness, as
though strangeness were his currency. The TV program, aired in 1970 as
“Jazz Portrait: Thelonious Monk,” was no different. The interview
at the center was conducted by Henri Renaud, a French jazz pianist,
whose evident idolization and envy of Monk distorts any effort at an
honest conversation. Both the final version and the additional footage
that was left out stand as a testament to the media’s effort to
capitalize on Monk’s perceived oddities by fashioning him into a
jester for his rapacious public.

 

 

 

“Rewind & Play: ‘It’s Not Nice?’
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a new documentary about Monk by the French Senegalese director Alain
Gomis, remixes the original raw footage into a devastating ballad of
the artist’s erasure. At the beginning of the film Monk deplanes in
Paris. From the opening frames, we witness the gleam in his eye and
the rhythm of his gait. As a muse, he is ideal—captivating to
observe and aware of his effect on others. A bewildered half smile
leaves and returns to his face in intervals, like a refrain. It’s
especially sincere at the arrivals gate, and it widens when his wife,
Nellie, who has accompanied him from New York, comes into frame. She
sports a low Afro, a sleek black coat, and gold-rimmed sunglasses
whose chic gaudiness contrasts with her modest demeanor. If Monk is
our muse, she is his.

From the outset, it is clear that the unspoken, like the dropped notes
in Monk’s music, is the defining characteristic of his approach to
private life. When he’s not looking at Nellie, whose presence makes
his hierarchy of feelings immediately apparent, it’s difficult to
determine the ratio of pleasure to angst in his movements. Film crew
in tow, the couple arrive at their hotel. Monk heads to a bar, still
armored in his regal half-hearted cheerfulness but on the brink of his
alternate register, a discreetly exasperated-ecstatic one. A
bystander, not wanting to be documented, remarks in French, “Oh,
it’s a hidden camera . . . we mustn’t talk.” Monk has a drink
and a hard-boiled egg, never putting down his cigarette. He turns
around to pet a dog that someone has brought to the bar, and, as the
light brightens, the bloodshot cast of travel and exhaustion is
visible in his eyes.

Monk’s dominant energy at this point in the film is a jovial
melancholy. In the recent past, his peer John Coltrane
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Powell and Elmo Hope had all died, and Monk himself had spent more
than twenty gruelling years of touring, playing, living, and composing
within the unforgiving confines of an industry that preyed upon its
talent. As Robin D. G. Kelley
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in his biography
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the jazz legend, Monk had quite literally walked off his pain,
sometimes walking so much that he got sores on his feet. Following the
death of his idol Coleman Hawkins, Monk was said to have paced for
three days. The cameras capture the wry decorum of a man too generous
to pursue escapism wholeheartedly and too intelligent to relish
sycophants trampling on his soulfulness in pursuit of his glamour. A
few scenes in, we get Monk at the piano rehearsing a haunted melody
while bystanders perch around the instrument and smoke. Renaud
instructs, “Make it look like it’s live . . . That’s the
modern way.”

The plaintive self-consciousness of this request makes Monk seem like
an ancient sage surrounded by fractious acolytes. The film crew stare
him down as he plays, as if his genius were a transgression and they
are a tribunal. His chords become more sombre, indicating his
awareness of their scrutiny. It’s a visually wrenching exchange
between performance and spectatorship. Eventually, Monk wearies and
leaps up from the bench abruptly, ceremoniously. In another scene, he
sits down and submits to the interview portion of the program. “Do
it your way,” he says, in restrained frustration. Among the melodies
Monk plays is “Crepuscule with Nellie,” a song he wrote for his
wife, and Renaud opens the interview by asking about her. All the
romance that Monk conjured with his composition is held up for
investigation. His bewildered grin returns and turns into something
more detached. Renaud repeats the question.“All I can say is that
she’s my wife and the mother of my kids,” Monk offers guardedly.
The film crew prod him for another take. He repeats the same simple
pronouncement. Do they want him to reiterate the passion that he
confessed to with his playing?

Renaud persists, changing the subject to feign mercy. Why does Monk
keep his piano in his kitchen, he asks, seemingly anticipating an
outlandish pop-spiritual explanation about the energy of the room, a
neat anecdote that can be added to jazz mythology. Monk responds
matter-of-factly: “That was the largest room in the apartment.”
Renaud appears crestfallen. In French, he had added that he’s been
to Monk’s “cramped” New York apartment, and inflects the
adjective with blunt pathos. Monk’s eyes are starting to spin and
rove, not in anger so much as the palpable disappointment of one who
has been tricked and cornered by forces he almost trusted.

Gomis does a startlingly precise job of imposing a Chaplinesque
burlesque on the breakdown in communication between Monk and Renaud.
There’s a muscle to the exchange between shots, takes, and pauses
that is reminiscent of real sparring in a ring. Sweat gathers on
Monk’s brow, its presence made more overwhelming by the invasive
lighting. His eyes narrow into deeper alertness and take on a saddened
cast, as the subtle attempts to undermine him accumulate. Tense
silences stand in for the bells between rounds.

Relentless, Renaud reroutes to another, equally risible line of
inquiry. He wants to know if Monk feels that he was “too
avant-garde” for the audience at his first concert in France, in
1954. Now Monk is openly indignant: “It seemed like that I was the
star the people was coming to see, but I wasn’t getting the
money.” Cut! This scene is the source of the film’s subtitle.
Having led Monk to acknowledge his own stature, Renaud halts.
“It’s not nice,” he eventually reprimands Monk condescendingly,
all of his submerged arrogance and entitlement finally on display.

On the second take, Monk’s recall is more detailed and more
resentful. He reiterates the sentiment that he was being exploited,
and it seems clear that he’s aware that he is again being exploited
in a similar way. “Bernard, I think it’s best if we erase it. What
he’s saying is really derogatory,” Renaud interjects in French, a
language Monk cannot fully understand. Monk is now smiling with an air
of sublimated rage and disbelief, still and statuesque as a tintype.
Imagine being berated and told that it’s an honor.

Monk stands up and attempts to walk offstage. “How about us going to
this dinner and forgetting this TV program?” he stammers, pained,
painful to watch. Renaud physically jostles him back toward the bench.
For a moment, their clash is a near-embrace, one that stalemates in
Monk’s tentative acquiescence. He’s still standing for his third
attempt at the question about his first tour in France. This round, he
plays the changes: “The first time I came to France, I was ossified
all the time I was here.” Finally, a threat—this retort proves he
knows that he’s being asked to stiffen into the same thankless
showmanship all over again. He lights a cigarette, his face now
assuming an expression of resigned contempt. He recounts his modest
beginnings for a few bars, while Renaud maintains a smug distance.
Then, with an emphatic “_Merci beaucoup!_,” Monk liberates himself
from the exchange.

“I should care, I should let it upset me” are the lyrics to the
song that Monk solos in the next scene. As the television crew orbit
the piano, he slurs the standard’s notes, some giggling and the bulk
sobbing quietly. While playing, he walks into his own shadow,
grinning. Monk’s dignity and agency are apparent in his walk, and he
plays like he walks, in round and dreamy notes with a destination
clear only to him. These are the brilliant circles for which he named
his compositions, and they are aspects of his nature that arouse
rapture from anyone with eyes and ears. Asking him to dissect his
process on a technical level is tantamount to an act of hostility.
Everything he has to testify he has volunteered as song and gesture,
spinning circles again and again for us, until we might comprehend the
pattern between notes that only he can access and that only he can
elaborate into work of understated and jarring beauty. The soft pink
hue of aged videotape appears over Monk’s image, like the flag of a
new nation under jazz. Beads of his sweat fall on ivory keys, and his
fingers move with even greater agility. More perspiration falls, and
the room goes silent.

Cameramen and journalists often make the mistake of thinking that they
can package an artist into an icon, bestowing upon their subject an
image that might be converted into money or fame. Biographers and
documentarians make this mistake, too. The elegance of “Rewind &
Play” lies in its effort to back away from this territory of error
and subjection, and in doing so to dim the obnoxious, prideful lights
of the tradition of star-making. The film closes with a montage of
Monk’s silent gestures, which exhibit a tenderness and
deliberateness so arresting that you almost forget you’ve just
watched him provoked into a muted war with the idea of himself. We
hope that Monk himself was able to forget that subtly riveting trauma,
but it’s doubtful. What we witness in “Rewind & Play” is likely
one of the incidents that instigated Monk’s withdrawal from public
life, seven years after “Jazz Portrait” was filmed. When, during
that retreat, the producer Orrin Keepnews called him to ask if he
would like to talk about “the old days” Monk’s succinct response
was “No, I wouldn’t.”

Many years later, in 1986, the pianist Cecil Taylor was filmed
watching a Monk concert on video. He gasps in appreciation and smiles
like a giddy child: “He has on wonderful shoes, he has on wonderful
shoes!” I think Cecil has it right. His outrageous praise lets him
meet Monk on his own terms, in a sense of rhythm and style so
exclusive that even its withholding character is a display of care and
sympathy toward admirers. Monk, his music, and his silence epitomize
an adage attributed to Louis Armstrong
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you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know. ♦

* Film
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* Film Review
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* documentary
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* Rewind and Play
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* Thenonius Monk
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* Alain Gomis
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