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Following Monk Institute





Following Monk Institute

Scheduled to coincide with the Jazz Loft exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in the fall of 2010, the Following Monk Institute will investigate and celebrate the North Carolina roots of Thelonious Monk's family and music. Highlights of this Center for Documentary Studies institute will include guided tours of Monk's birthplace in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and the Newton Grove plantation where his ancestors were slaves and where relatives still live today.

The Following Monk Institute is a rare opportunity to tour sites of Monk's early life and heritage and the geography of eastern North Carolina. Led by Sam Stephenson, director of the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies, participants will have the unique experience of hearing from some of Monk's family members—Duke neurobiologist Erich Jarvis, educator Pam Monk Kelley of New Haven, Connecticut, and Gaston Monk, an educator from Pitt County, North Carolina—about their extensive research on the family tree, and from Monk's son, T.S. Monk, about the relationship between the family and Monk's music. Participants will also hear from historians and musicians who will discuss the cultural and musical significance of Monk's North Carolina heritage. Speakers will include Monk's last saxophonist and family friend, Paul Jeffrey, and Georgetown University's Maurice Jackson, who will explore the links between Monk's music and spirituals and rural church music. Renowned pianist Henry Butler will also present an exclusive concert based on the same topic. Guggenheim Award-winning poet Betty Adcock will read a poem, commissioned for this event as a tribute to the role of Monk's mother and the other female pillars in his life.

The institute will include an exclusive presentation of sounds and images of Monk's 1959 Town Hall rehearsals that took place in the New York loft of Hall Overton and photographer W. Eugene Smith, whose obsessive photo and audio documentation provides profound new glimpses of the complexities of Monk and his music. This is a first-time preview of a major project at the Center for Documentary Studies, involving the exploration and documentation of rich untold stories of the after-hours New York jazz scene in the late 1950s to mid-1960s as seen through encounters in Smith's loft.



MORE INFORMATION
Details of the Following Monk Institute will be posted on this web page as they become available. Please email Sarah Moye at smm49@duke.edu with more immediate questions.


CDS RADIO PODCAST
Digging Up Thelonius Monk's Southern Roots
Produced by John Biewen of CDS Radio
Edited by Tom Cole

Listen to the broadcast (8:05 minutes)

The jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk would have celebrated his 90th birthday on October 10, 2007. Monk died in 1982. Besides his penchant for odd hats and other eccentricities, Monk is usually remembered as a hip New Yorker. He was a pioneer of Bebop who lived most of his life on Manhattan’s West Side. But Monk was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and raised by his mother, a native of that tobacco and railroad town. Some scholars and fellow musicians say Monk’s Southern roots had an overlooked but important influence on the man and his music. Our story was produced by John Biewen of CDS Radio.

Visit All Things Considered's Web site for their broadcast of "Digging Up Thelonius Monk's Southern Roots"




Green Street, later renamed Red Row, the Rocky Mount, North Carolina road on which Thelonious Monk's family lived, from his birth in 1917 until 1922. Photo by Jonathan Williams, 1970, Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.



PRESS FOR THE FOLLOWING MONK INSTITUTE
A Round of Applause for Duke Perfomances [editorial] (The Chronicle, October 25, 2007)

Jazz Loft Director Sam Stephenson writes about Thelonious Monk's connections to North Carolina in The 9th Annual Music Issue (2007) of the Oxford American

Thelonious Monk focus of 6-week, 18-event tribute at Duke University (International Herald-Tribune, August 6, 2007)

Festival to honor Monk (News and Observer, August 5, 2007)





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Railroad tracks of the "Around the Y" neighborhood, approximately 200 yards from Thelonious Monk's birth home, Rocky Mount, North Carolina, May 2007

Photo by Sam Stephenson and Frank Hunter, made with W. Eugene Smith's original Sinar 4x5 view camera