When it comes to how I listen to music, I'm decidedly unsentimental: keep your art piece turntable and $50,000 cables, thanks—a pile of FLACs on my home media server is more than enough for me; have fun flipping your records every 20 minutes. But every so often an album comes along that makes me feel foolish for not owning it in full 12" glory. Monk's Underground is one such album. I mean, just look at it:¹

The album notes helpfully clarify that naturally these war trophies were captured by Monk in WWII, as part of his service with the French Resistance, and add: "Oh yes, about the girl with the firearm in the background. No explanation was asked, nor was one forthcoming."²

That's all bollocks of course; Monk never fought for the French. The girl, however, did: that's none other than Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Born a Rothschild (yes, those ones), she fought with the Free French Army during WWII. After the war, she ended up moving to New York, where she developed an infatuation with jazz. She was extremely close with all the leading musicians and always ready to offer a ride, quash a vexing bill, or—in at least one extreme case—take the rap for a drug bust and serve a few nights in jail. In fact, you might recognize her if you watched Clint Eastwood's Charlie Parker movie with me a while back—she was the one to offer Parker succor (at her apartment) in his final hours. So it went with Monk as well: after he stopped performing in the mid-seventies, he spent the last six years of his life living in her New Jersey home.

But I suppose I ought to be judging the album itself, not its cover. We first heard Monk on Monk's Dream—interestingly, that was the first album his quartet released with Columbia; Underground was the last. I ended that earlier review with a hope: "maybe by the end of this project I'll be able to better appreciate Monk's genius in its own right." Well, 25 weeks later I still have yet to crack that puzzle. Fundamentally, Monk leaves me a bit cold: it's pleasant enough to listen to, and I like the back and forth between Monk on piano and Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, but I never feel swept up in emotion the way I do with, say, Erroll Garner. Surprisingly, the real standout for me on this album was the bass (played by Larry Gales): in both "Raise Four" and "Easy Street," it produces a low, grinding groan quite unlike most other albums—evoking not a particular instrument so much as the shifting of a massive sailing ship amidst the churning sea.³ But the overall winner for me is "In Walked Bud," hands-down. I happened to hear a completely different version of it featuring a female vocalist a few weeks ago on JAZZ.FM; I had no idea then that it was a Monk composition, but there was something about the off-kilter, self-referential chorus that was immediately beguiling. This particular recording—one of many Monk made throughout his career—creates that same magic, and is (mercifully) the full 6:48 version on this CD release (rather than the reduced 4:17 version on the original LP).

So: I leave this week with more questions than I started with. Who was this man—both flamboyant stage dancer and taciturn eccentric—and what does his music mean for us? I still don't have answers, but I have perhaps a touch more perspective: call it cope, but these jazz mysteries are just like the rest of life—the journey is more important than the destination. I'm happy to keep exploring; if fifty weeks becomes fifty years, so be it.

Favourite track: In Walked Bud