It’s a great era for jazz documentaries. The latest exhibit is Alain Gomis’s ‘Rewind & Play: Thelonious Monk’, based around some long-lost footage of the jazz piano giant filming a French TV special at the end of his 1969 European tour.
Some of the edited footage was shown on French TV as ‘Jazz Portraits: Thelonious Monk’ in 1970 (and used in Charlotte Zwerin’s classic 1989 Monk doc ‘Straight No Chaser’), but this film reinstates many outtakes.
We see a broadly-smiling Monk touching down at the airport, travelling by car to the TV studio with wife Nellie and tour manager Jules Colomby, nervously drinking in a hotel bar, petting a dog, eating a boiled egg.
Then Monk is interviewed in the studio by Henri Renaud, a section that is awkward, embarrassing, occasionally a little offensive. Monk answers the questions willingly, honestly and with no little humour. But, as endless retakes are suggested, he becomes frustrated, visibly tiring when no answer is deemed good enough without any explanation given.
(Robin D.G. Kelley has a far more sympathetic take on these proceedings in his peerless Monk biography, though he may well have not seen the outtakes we are privy too here.)
But the sections that really elevate ‘Rewind & Play: Thelonious Monk’ to classic status are the solo piano performances. There are superb renditions of ‘Reflections’, ‘Light Blue’, ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’, ‘Blue Monk’, ‘Crepescule With Nellie’ and ‘Played Twice’.
Seen on the big screen, we get an oft-forgotten impression of the sheer weight of Monk’s playing, sweat pouring down his face. It’s moving, exciting, essential viewing if you are a fan or just a fan of great piano playing, and telling too: a few months later, he informed his wife that he was ‘really very ill’ and was never quite the same again.