The Zeitgeist
IN THE MUSIC world there are always strange anecdotes; Lully killed himself through accidentally stabbing his foot with a conducting stick and Alkan was crushed to death by his piles of manuscripts, yet none is stranger than the story I was told about Thelonious Monk. A descendent of his great patron, Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, told me that this famously introverted man was a demon ping-pong player and could take all comers.
The same source also told me that when Charlie Parker was coming off drugs at Koenigswarter’s house, he dreamed of starting a vegetable plot. I thought as bizarre Jazz anecdotes go they were pretty good, but yesterday I found out something else about Thelonious that got me thinking.
It turns out that his name is in fact a spelling mistake, a mis-transliteration of Philonious, the son of Mercury in Ovid’s Metamorphosis and that his middle name was Sphere (yes that’s right, Thelonious Sphere Monk). Mistake or not, it made me realize one of the coolest things about jazz: the names. Lets look at some of the classics of Jazz musician names.
In the world of stride and boogie-woogie piano we have Professor Longhair, Scrapper Blackwell, Fats Domino, the ex-Pimp and boxer, Champion Jack Dupree and his teacher Drive’em Down Hall and lets not forget the greatest (in my opinion) of them all, Willy ‘the Lion’ Smith (christened William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith).
Some say Smith got the name for his bravery in World War One, others because at one point he claimed that he was descended from King David and was the Lion of Judah.The story you got generally depended on what Cigar you bought Smith beforehand. Even more modern jazz musicians picked good names.
At the piano you could find those aristocrats of jazz • Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, at the saxophone the euphonious Illinois Jacquet, on trumpet the wild Dizzy Gillespie and on double bass the somewhat unfortunately named Charles Mingus (for Classicists out there he did, of course, do an album called Mingus-a-um).
But why do I bring this up? I was feeling a bit concerned about the state of Jazz at the moment, wouldn’t you be when it appears to be either Jools Holland, Jamie Cullum or a quartet of 2 Saxophones, a Marimba and an old shoe riffing on Misterioso? I then realised the musicians need renaming.
How can the music be good when its played by musicians named things like Courtenay Pine, a name that sounds like an out of town furniture shop? If you give them cool names its possible they might just make cool music as well?
27th Apr 2006