Monk's Music is a distinctive jazz study that resists simple classification. Although it is designed neither as a biography nor as a stylistic overview, Gabriel Solis's book could serve as a useful complement to either. In contrast to typical biographies, which cover a subject's life and music in detail and often conclude with brief thoughts on its subject's influence and reach, Monk's Music takes the opposite approach, providing a brief biographical sketch of the pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, followed by an extensive and detailed consideration of his legacy. As Solis acknowledges, it is a book “not about what Monk is or was, but what he has been” (7). To a limited extent, the book addresses the general subject of Monk's compositions, performances, and recordings; to a greater degree, it examines how and why members of today's jazz community have cared about and responded to Monk's music, and how they have constructed Monk's legacy in the process of creating their own. Tracing what its subtitle describes as “jazz history in the making,” Monk's Music explores the intersections of jazz and musical influence, authenticity, canonization, and the construction of personal and musical histories.

Solis does not follow ethnographic convention in terms of conducting extensive fieldwork or integrating himself fully into a musical community for a lengthy period of time. Instead, he relies most heavily on a set of interviews with a dozen jazz musicians, including Steve Lacy, Joe Lovano, Fred Hersch, and Randy Weston. Gaining such access is quite a feat, and Solis treats their testimony with the utmost respect. Although these musicians are not members of the same community in the sense of geography or kinship, the shared orientation of this disparate group towards Monk's music enables Solis to delve into issues surrounding the history of jazz and the musical negotiation and performance of collective memory. By taking seriously their personal, musical, and social concerns, Solis argues that these “jazz musicians have participated as actors, agents, subjects, and narrators in their own history in both musical practice and metamusical discourse” (16). Because of the considerable attention given to his informants and the depth of their commentary, Solis's work resonates with Eric Porter's What Is This Thing Called Jazz?, a thoughtful study of how jazz musicians construct notions of jazz history in the process of shaping it.Footnote ¹ Solis does not attempt, however, to trace the full history and range of Monk's influence: that project would have required more comprehensive treatment of Monk's reception during his lifetime as well as further study of today's jazz educators, critics, fans, promoters, and industry executives.

Solis's treatment of this material remains fairly balanced throughout—only from time to time does he reveal aesthetic preferences—but most voices in this book apparently hold an unquestioned devotion to Monk. Solis explains in detail why many musicians have gravitated towards Monk, but leaves open the issue of whether and to what extent they also have been influenced by other musicians. Consequently, it remains somewhat unclear how Solis's informants approach Monk in comparison to other jazz icons. That it is not possible to draw extensive comparisons between the legacy of Monk and that of other key jazz figures such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, or Louis Armstrong is of course a testament to the uniqueness of Solis's project. Considering that Monk was not always understood or championed by his contemporaries, it would have been interesting to hear a few contrarian views, perhaps from current musicians who remain skeptical about Monk's music.

To complement and contextualize the observations of his informants, Solis attempts to blend ethnographic and historical approaches by analyzing studio recordings, liner notes, performances, published interviews, video footage, and a host of critical and scholarly texts. Furthermore, he interprets his key findings through lenses adopted from various fields, including ethnomusicology, jazz studies, anthropology, social theory, and African American cultural studies. No single approach guides this book, but the panoply of views gives Solis the chance to reflect on the broader ramifications of jazz practice today and to frame his work in relationship to other studies—in particular the ethnomusicological approaches of Paul Berliner and Ingrid Monson.Footnote ² Although the incorporation of theoretical concerns sometimes leads to an uneven quality of tone and language, Solis makes a number of clever connections between jazz and various thinkers—from Jean Baudrillard to Houston Baker, Paul Gilroy to Antonio Gramsci. The most sustained and effective integration of theory and musical analysis takes shape in Solis's ruminations on musical historiography and social memory, drawing on work by Mikhail Bakhtin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Pierre Nora, among others. By interpreting the thoughts and musical activities of his subjects through the perspectives offered by such theories, Solis explains how practitioners of jazz continuously negotiate with the past while building a vibrant living musical tradition. Placing musicians and their musical choices at its center, Monk's Music demonstrates the power of ethnography to expand our musical knowledge far beyond the lasting resonance of Thelonious Monk. Indeed, the originality of Solis's approach not only shows how musicians think and act historically but also suggests how scholars might widen their own horizons, whether by carrying out further projects on the question of musical influence, by interviewing additional sectors of the jazz community, or by merging ethnographic and historical methods with cultural theory.

The book is organized in three sections, each increasing in length: first, an introduction to Monk's life and a broad assessment of his impact on today's jazz musicians; next, a closer exploration of musical influence in jazz, complemented by detailed analyses of the interpretive approaches taken by three pianists to playing Monk's music; and finally a wide-ranging examination of how Monk's legacy has been and continues to be contested by different participants in the jazz world, from mainstream traditionalists to members of the jazz avant-garde.

Chapter 1 presents a succinct biographical sketch containing just enough information to situate readers unfamiliar with the basic outlines of Monk's life and career. Solis digs deeper in chapter 2, which argues that Monk's impact can be gauged especially well by consulting the community of jazz musicians interested in his music, a set of informants who shift fluidly between roles of listener, critic, and performer. This provocative, sweeping, and open-ended discussion, constituting the book's most powerful individual chapter, upends conventional practice for reception studies by turning away from the usual sources and placing the spotlight on contemporary musicians. Many factors may affect a musician's legacy—including critical reception, the availability of recordings, the enthusiasm of core listeners, the role of jazz education—but Solis spotlights how jazz musicians have made significant contributions to extending Monk's legacy by studying, performing, and recording his music. To explain why musicians so often have been drawn to Monk, Solis points out a number of special qualities in his music, including distinctive approaches to time and form, the creation of an idiosyncratic musical voice, and the incorporation of musical humor and playfulness. Here, as in other parts of the book, Solis offers plenty to whet the reader's appetite; indeed, a differently configured study might have expanded productively on any of these individual passages. As it stands, Solis's convincing mix of ethnographic research and musical analysis produces compelling observations and raises provocative questions for future exploration.

Chapters 3 and 4 make up the book's second section, which traces how contemporary musicians have approached and extended Monk's legacy. Solis first presents a general overview of the ongoing dialogue between today's musicians and jazz tradition, drawing variously on commentary from his informants, prior jazz ethnographies, and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence.Footnote ³ After outlining how musicians develop their own voices—creating new musical meanings while negotiating with the past—Solis proceeds to a close examination of how this process has played out for three notable jazz pianists: Danilo Perez, Jessica Williams, and Fred Hersch. Solis deftly fleshes out this section with analyses of performances and recordings to reveal the alternative strategies and motivations adopted by today's musicians towards interpreting Monk. Although these three case studies are not sufficient to support some of the book's broad claims involving jazz, race, and gender, Solis demonstrates how differently positioned musicians choose different approaches to Monk, whether to establish their credibility in the jazz world or to retain individuality by maintaining some distance from Monk. In the process, Monk's Music suggests that jazz history constitutes much more than a list of famous recordings or a parade of vaunted styles and instead embodies a living process involving the everyday decisions and creative choices of today's musicians. This process, Solis emphasizes, has helped to establish Monk as both a historical figure and one who has remained a vibrant part of today's jazz.

The last four chapters, the book's longest section, continue the examination of how musicians adapt and channel Monk's legacy. Here, Solis looks at one of its more curious aspects involving how the music of this eccentric and distinctive individualist has resonated with both mainstream traditionalists and the jazz avant-garde. This paradox echoes observations by Scott DeVeaux and others concerning how divergent musicians and musical practices have been gathered within the fold of a unified jazz tradition; however, Solis reveals through well-chosen examples and lucid descriptive passages how such constructions are contested by musicians who wish to lay various claims.Footnote ⁴ Although Monk has been legitimized through a classicizing project that involves jazz institutions, reissues of collected works, arrangements for repertory groups, tribute concerts, and numerous recordings, more might be said here about the roles played by jazz education and critical reception in the canonizing process. Solis helpfully reveals the contradictions and the lack of consensus within the jazz mainstream surrounding how to approach Monk's music. His notable comparisons of the repertory jazz movement to the historical performance of early music also help to illuminate the relationship of jazz to issues of authenticity, fidelity, historicism, and cultural legitimacy.

Spanning outward, the book's final two chapters acknowledge the rich variety of approaches to Monk taken by musicians beyond the mainstream. After briefly acknowledging musicians outside jazz circles who share an interest in Monk, Solis explains how today's jazz avant-garde considers him to be such a significant voice, and an important symbolic hero, because of his idiosyncratic compositions, musical nonconformity, and wide range of expressiveness. Drawing on interviews and detailed analyses—including a persuasive passage concerning a tricky Monk arrangement by the Art Ensemble of Chicago—Solis reveals the diversity of contemporary approaches that claim different stakes on Monk's legacy, showing how these “musicians play a role in keeping his music in our ears, on stage, and on recordings” (204). After his impassioned discussions about why negotiating with the jazz past has become so critical today, Solis concludes by underscoring how contemporary jazz musicians continue to contest notions of what jazz has been and what it can be.