Monk loved that kind of one-upmanship, the playful banter, challenges from those who weren't afraid to engage him. Teeny sassed back, "It is supposed to be played adagio and you played it allegro." "Whaaaa? What are you talking about? I played it ten times faster than anyone could!" So then I said, 'You didn't play that right.'" "Then after he was through, he jumped up from the piano and just started grinning. "His hands were a blur," she recalled decades later.
In response, Monk sat down at the piano, turned to a very difficult piece, and started playing it at breakneck speed. Teeny thumbed through the pages of the Chopin book, then turned to her uncle and asked, "What are you doing with that on the piano? I thought you couldn't read music? You can read that?" The challenge was on. The lid remained closed, since it doubled as a temporary storage space for music, miscellaneous papers, magazines, folded laundry, dishes, and any number of stray kitchen items.
It occupied a significant portion of the kitchen and extended into the front room. Monk's piano was notorious for its clutter. During one of her many visits in 1959 or '60, when she was about twelve years old, Teeny noticed a book of compositions by Chopin perched on her uncle's rented Steinway baby grand piano. Like all his nieces and nephews, Teeny treated her uncle as an uncle - not as some eccentric genius or celebrity. Uncle "Baby," Thelonious's younger brother Thomas, lived a couple of doors down, so his four children were always in the mix. The apartment and the neighborhood became a playground for Teeny's six siblings, as well as her cousins and their family friends. Their two children, "Toot" (Thelonious, Jr.) and "Boo Boo" (Barbara), added to the drama and the fun they were full of energy, and their parents encouraged them to express themselves freely. Aunt Nellie chatted away, sometimes entertaining the kids with wild and wonderful stories, sometimes cursing booking agents, managers, and anyone else who took advantage of her dear husband, sometimes gently scolding one of her nieces not to "bang" on the piano. Uncle Thelonious sat at the piano turning Christmas carols into Monk originals, or holding forth with a string of friendly put-downs or challenging questions about the ways of the world. For a kid growing up in the late '50s and early '60s, the Monks' tiny ground-floor apartment at 243 West 63rd Street, must have seemed almost carnivalesque. Critic Paul Bacon, 1949īenetta Smith - known affectionately as "Teeny" - loved to visit her Aunt Nellie and Uncle Thelonious. There isn't any great difficulty about it, because both sides are fertile ground the stories merely differ in plausibility.
I have a choice here between writing about Monk as he is, or as he seems to be, and is generally thought to be.
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