Black is nature’s hiding place, where she stores her loot. — Bill Gunn
Circa 1935, during the hiatus between one World War and the next, an eighteen year old piano prodigy named Thelonious Sphere Monk composed a song called “Round About Midnight,” “‘Round Midnight” for short. It would be recorded for the first time in 1944 by the Cootie Williams Band and go on to become of the most recorded jazz standards there is, especially among those standards composed by a black musicians. Monk loved circles, and aroundness, he would often rise from the piano bench to twirl in slow motion or frantic staccato between solos. The one thing the official clocks got right is the circle, often characterized as a loop in music, it’s the interval-driven circumference of a set of events that would otherwise be total improvisers thriving on the chaos of everything being possible or as Monk himself once put it everything is happening all the time.
“Round Midnight” is a bright and sullen, at moments reeling, at others stumbling, attitude about when the day begins, and doom is staved off by rebirth and a renewed cycle. The so-called ‘doomsday clock’ that alleges to predict when the world as we know it might end, aligns that final blow with midnight also. Who is right, the lyricist or the bleary-eyed politicians; is midnight a villain or some semblance of salvation? In the song, the myth of midnight is set to an atmosphere of reverence, slow gallop, soft lean into a new way of deciding what time it is. It is what time it feels like it is, Monk inflects, sonic grin in the chord changes, chagrin in each long hesitation between phrases. His solo version is my favorite because you can hear and feel the tautness of his consideration in each and every isolated note, as if in re-designating time he redeems the parts of his psyche that have been beholden to other people’s paltry concepts of it. This is his maritime coming-of-age anthem and it sets the tone for how he will live and what he will offer us for the duration of his time on earth— a brand new inimitable method of keeping time, one that, if given more credence would let us reorient space around it and make the clock this man, his legs the hands, his decision to stand up or halt in the middle of a song the decisive force that allows each day to begin.
Monk is an arbiter, a leader who leads not by will but by suggestion and an almost vicious sense of style that renders his every suggestion akin to a fact or law. His incidental playfulness on the tightrope that is his playing is not the playfulness of a clown or comic, he’s not laughing or propelled by gratuitous mischief, he’s catching himself like a net of wind before he falls from the heights he invents, the way fathers toss their young children into the air and let them giggle each descent back into their waiting arms in a game of play that is also a ritual of rescue and promise. For a brief and endless moment the child floats in space ahead and outside of time and her whole life becomes possible, and the fall as imperative as the biblical fall, a body moving into resonance with its mundane environment and agreeing to the loop of days. In agreeing to that loop she invents and perpetuates it, becoming an accomplice in all of its exclusions. Round midnight some days, we can sneak into the waiting room between dimensions and question that agreement and what it forecloses. It was during those hours that real black language and black love were invented, in defiance of arduous days of being a fixed idea or a machine, ‘round midnight we become demigods and bend nature’s memory to our will. The demon is the light of day, which will turn us simple and obedient, again too visible to do our secret magic. Monk’s disobedience is a currency we needed for when the clock arms or father’s arms disappeared and we were still lingering in the sky like sweet dark clouds, expecting to be saved.
I didn’t go to my father’s funeral and I’ve never visited his grave. At the time I was too young to make the decision for myself, and my mother and I were living with my grandparents across the country, and she was eight and a half months pregnant. The vertigo of it, the anegoic blurted out circularity of life— one out, one in, three days apart it would turn out. Who has time to mourn from the center of that circle. Why did they bury my father in a square when he needed a circle, a roundabout, a gleaming cul-de-sac eternity. And what would I say, seeing him like that, strummed by a shovel into a dirt road of corpses? If I leaned in too far would his arms be there to catch me or snatch me like a pitiful lonely reaper, like the charismatic proto-rapper he was, would he have a story about his loop of time and tell it in grunts and glances the way Monk delivers “Round Midnight” when he’s alone for twenty one sacred minutes.
Monk and my dad had some things in common: Music, stature, both impressively tall men, a love of hats, a love of clothes, a closed loop of timeless time within which they rose and collapsed into songs, and periods of extreme silence during which they let those songs speed out ahead of them so they could relax. For that they were called crazy and treated with medications that made them retreat deeper into themselves where the cages were more brilliant circles called songs. If men must be redundant, let them repeat in this pattern. If men must trap themselves in ideas, let those ideas sing. Maybe I’m never visiting my father in that Iowa cemetery, or maybe I’ve already been within the time loop that includes the future. What I know is, like Monk’s contemplative long pauses that widen midnight into a never ending occasion, whatever I’m withholding as formality by imagining what I haven’t seen up close, has forced so much intimacy with the ghost of the man who used to catch me in his arms as I giggled dramatic ironies, that I have rescued his spirit from the lie of time and space, which is what Monk’s music might teach anyone brave to do.