Robin D.G. Kelley’s Bio of Thelonious Monk Wins Award

Jazz journalists don’t always grant much respect to academics who write about jazz–no more than jazz musicians grant to jazz journalists–and yet books by academics and from academic presses fared particularly well at Monday’s annual awards ceremony of the Jazz Journalists Association.

Four books with academic connections were among the five nominees for the prize for best book of 2009, and the winner was…Robin D.G. Kelley, for his Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press), an acclaimed account of the singular pianist who rewrote rules of harmony and rhythm in jazz during the 1950s and 1960s.

Kelley, since 2006, a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, is a leading chronicler of African-American history, but until now has not been a renowned figure in studies of jazz. “A pianist of sorts,” as he describes himself, he nonetheless admits it took him three decades to understand Monk’s playing.

Reviewers think he did manage that. For example, in Time Out Magazine, K. Leander Williams wrote:  “If every icon deserves at least one definitive bio, it’s official: Monk now has his.”

Writing to The Chronicle from Britain, where he is traveling, Kelley said: “I was impressed and gratified by the award. … I’m gratified not only because they take my research and my version of Monk’s story very seriously, but because I’m not a professional musician. In the case of George Lewis’s brilliant book [A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press), which won the award last year], the fact is he was already established as one of the most important modern composers, a brilliant trombone player, and a pioneer in computer-based music. He had the credentials before he wrote his magnum opus. I didn’t. So you can imagine what the award meant to me in terms of earning respect from my peers.”

As for the question of why jazz journalists often are skeptical of academic writing about jazz, Kelley said he does not blame them, “in part because some of the work in the name of cultural studies is often sloppy or imprecise when it comes to jazz–the music and the history.”

Three other books with university or university-press connections were among the five nominees for the jazz-journalists’ best-book award. One was I Walked With Giants: The Autobiography of Jimmy Heath (Temple University Press), in which the saxophonist, educator, and National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master described his life at the center of many important developments in the art form during the second half of the 20th century. Assisting him in writing his life was Joseph McLaren, a professor of English at Hofstra University.

The two others were The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 (Knopf, 2009) by Sam Stephenson, a writer and instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and Jazz (W.W. Norton) by Scott DeVeaux, an associate professor of music at the University of Virginia, and Gary Giddins, the Village Voice jazz critic and visiting lecturer in American studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.–Peter Monaghan