Thelonious Monk was a genius, but that distinction has at times done him a disservice. No less a genius was Louis Armstrong, but his persona was that of an entertainer, not a brooding artist. The misguided idea that Monk’s music, for all its peculiarities, is “difficult” is closely linked with the image of him as the eccentric “high priest” of bebop, which, while not unearned, was played up by the record labels that released his music early on. Listeners who, during bebop’s emergence in the 1940s, found the aggressive virtuosity of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie off-putting probably had no idea what to make of Monk’s angular melodies, harmonic inversions, and dissonant voicings—his distinctive synthesis of whimsy and soul.
Long after Monk had garnered the acclaim that he so richly deserved, even landing a Time magazine cover in 1964, he was still frequently treated less as a visionary who invented his own language on the piano—building on the Harlem stride that he’d absorbed in the 1920s—and more as an idiot savant. The new film by French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis, Rewind & Play, brings to light, through a time capsule from 1969, a disappointing example of this.
By December of ’69, Monk had released what would be his final studio recordings for Columbia Records and was wrapping up a concert tour of Europe. On the 15th, he arrived in Paris for a performance at the Salle Pleyel (a recording of which was released in 1991, and reissued in 2013 by Blue Note). In the afternoon before the show, Monk appeared as a guest on the French-language television program Jazz Portrait. Gomis was given access to two hours’ worth of footage from the shoot while researching a different project about Monk, and has culled selections from that material as the basis for his film, which runs just over an hour in length.
The program’s host, Henri Renaud, comes across as more than a little bit square, reminiscing about “hanging out” with Monk in New York in the ’50s and failing to establish a rapport with him while doing his best Steve Allen routine, casually leaning against the piano. (“Lean on both arms!” the director calls from off screen.) The language barrier doesn’t help matters: Renaud translates his questions from French to English, and Monk’s responses back into French.
As it happens, Renaud was no poseur. You’d never guess it from his presentation on Jazz Portrait, but he was a notable pianist in his own right and had recorded with the likes of Clifford Brown and Oscar Pettiford. But his simple-minded questions during this late-’60s segment (“Why did you keep your piano in the kitchen?” he asks, to which Monk responds, “It’s the only place it would fit”) reflect a limited grasp of Monk’s artistry and a narrow-minded focus on his quirks and mannerisms, all of which is undoubtedly informed by the racial dynamic at play.
Many black jazz musicians in the pre-civil rights era went to Paris and found the respect—both as artists and as people—that eluded them at home, but it was no paradise. While shooting Jazz Portrait, Monk recalls how, at a music festival during his first visit to Paris in ’54, he was paid less than the other musicians on the bill. Renaud tells Monk he shouldn’t say that because “it isn’t nice” and attempts a do-over. Later, a hungry, tired, and clearly fed-up Monk stands up from the piano and tries to get Renaud to wrap up the show and come have dinner. In this moment, Renaud almost gets to the point of physical restraint as he cajoles Monk into sitting down and finishing. There’s a pervading sense throughout Rewind & Play of the great artist being handled and manipulated rather than honored and observed.
Apart from the uncomfortable stop-start rhythm of the interview, several gorgeous solo performances constitute a significant portion of the film’s runtime, and provide its main pleasure. One of the most remarkable sequences finds Monk, focus unbroken, warming up at the piano while crew members set up lights and discuss camera angles in a bustle around him.
In The Beatles: Get Back, a recent series compiling unused footage and audio material captured for the 1970 documentary Let It Be, Peter Jackson made a misguided attempt to enhance the feeling of immediacy by cleaning up the image with digital noise reduction. Gomis, by contrast, foregrounds the visual imperfections of his archival material: the tracking lines, chroma errors, color bleed, and snow, plus frequent audio drop-outs. The result is a highly mediated experience. We aren’t “in the room” with Monk; we’re watching him through television cameras. Rather than a distancing effect (one shot is so close to Monk that his breath condenses on the lens), this serves as an ever-present reminder of the artificiality of the entire undertaking.
The revelation of such raw, frustrating, occasionally revealing footage of one of American music’s major figures—a document of his treatment at the hands of the press and a satisfying recording of a soulful solo performance—makes Rewind & Play a worthwhile experience, even if the film itself amounts to little more than the sum of its parts.
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