Thus, we see Monk noodling at a Columbia recording session, then expressing disappointment that the take wasn't recorded (they thought it was just a warm-up). Occasionally there are moments when he's aware of the camera, but mostly he ignores it, which means that the most introverted of pianist-composers makes himself available to be captured in affecting and compelling ways. The great thing about the Blackmore brothers' footage is that they were able to just hang around long enough so that Monk eventually began to lower his guard. Shining like unearthed treasure, punctuated by posthumously recorded talking heads of those close to Monk, it's the big reason Zwerin's assemblage (produced with the aid of jazz aficionados Clint Eastwood and Bruce Ricker) seems both humane and, in the end, exhilarating in ways no conventionally structured documentary, tethered to a narrative through line, could have been.
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That footage, shelved for years, is at the heart of this 1988 film directed by Charlotte Zwerin. It began in 19 when documentarians Michael and Christian Blackmore, commissioned by West German television, followed Monk around for six months, filming him in grainy black and white, in a number of contexts, in fly-on-the-wall style. It beats the odds, though, turning into a pungent time capsule that not only offers insights into the legendarily non-verbal Monk (1917-1982), but into his process and his era besides. Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988) could easily have seemed a patchwork cobbled together from disparate pieces. But the lids he placed on his head seemed the only ones in the vicinity of the piano, the lids of which seemed to lift off, propelled not just by his digital dexterity and often percussive touch, but by the feeling that while Monk's music-making was spontaneous, it had in it something pent up for a long time, spilling and cascading from his depths. In a time when jazz musicians favored berets - the 1940s through the 1960s - his trademark lids usually ran to skullcaps, sometimes tasseled, often embroidered. Pianist-composer Thelonious Monk, one of the certifiable geniuses of jazz, remains one of its iconic presences, bent over a keyboard in collar, suit, tie, jacket, sunglasses and most famously topped off by one or another piece of his idiosyncratic headgear.