Music Mondays Presents: Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser

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Music Mondays Presents Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
Monday, February 17
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (320 E 6th Street)
$2, 18+, 10pm
[info] | [tickets]

When Thelonious Monk passed away in 1982, his status as an innovator and one of the leading figures in modern jazz music was well established. A pianist who cut his first recording in 1944, Monk went on to work with fantastic musicians over his remarkable career including Sonny Rollins (tenor sax), Art Blakey (drums), Miles Davis (trumpet), John Coltrane (tenor sax) and many others. An unusual and versatile performer, Monk’s personal behavior was often just as spontaneous, and his relationships with others, including his wife and child, were as challenging as some of his best music.

Culled from a large stash of archived footage discovered in the 1980s, the film Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser was released in 1988, and features clips of Monk performing live, recording, interacting with his friends and family, and is also accompanied by interviews with the people closest to him which were filmed posthumously, including his son T.S. Monk, who discusses his father’s bouts of mental illness, among other subjects.

The film was directed by Charlotte Zwerin and produced by Clint Eastwood, and is a must-see look at this jazz legend’s complicated inner life, giving us a fly-on-the-wall vantage point of his great performances and day-to-day routine. Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser will also have repeat showings this Tuesday and next Monday. This Music Monday presentation is sponsored by Dewar's and also by Antone's Records.

If this isn’t enough to satisfy your lust for music cinema, or if you’re just hankering for something much more localized and freaked-out, you’ll be interested in catching Dirty Road to Psychedelia, which is showing at 5:20pm this Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Buy your tickets in person or online, and head on over right after work to catch this film about Austin in the 60s, a time when The Vulcan Gas Company was thriving, renting a house in “the ghetto” was just 40 bucks a month, and the 13th Floor Elevators were rocking this town like no one else.