Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

From the publisher’s site:

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of “bebop” and establishing Monk as one of America’s greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk’s hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.

In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk — witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. Indeed, Thelonious Monk is essentially a love story. It is a story of familial love, beginning with Monk’s enslaved ancestors from whom Thelonious inherited an appreciation for community, freedom, and black traditions of sacred and secular song. It is about a doting mother who scrubbed floors to pay for piano lessons and encouraged her son to follow his dream. It is the story of romance, from Monk’s initial heartbreaks to his lifelong commitment to his muse, the extraordinary Nellie Monk. And it is about his unique friendship with the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a scion of the famous Rothschild family whose relationship with Monk and other jazz musicians has long been the subject of speculation and rumor. Nellie, Nica, and various friends and family sustained Monk during the long periods of joblessness, bipolar episodes, incarceration, health crises, and other tragic and difficult moments.

Above all, Thelonious Monk is the gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos,Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz’s most original composer.

Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley, University of Texas Press, December 2009, 6 x 9 in., 416 pp., 25 b&w illus., ISBN: 978-0-292-71997-2, $65.00, hardcover with dust jacket.

From the publisher’s site:

Surrealists themselves have always preferred to speak of it in terms of dynamics, dialectics, goals, and struggles. Accordingly, surrealist groups have always encouraged and exemplified the widest diversity—from its start the movement was emphatically opposed to racism and colonialism, and it embraced thinkers from every race and nation.

Yet in the vast critical literature on surrealism, all but a few black poets have been invisible. Academic histories and anthologies typically, but very wrongly, persist in conveying surrealism as an all-white movement, like other “artistic schools” of European origin. In glaring contrast, the many publications of the international surrealist movement have regularly featured texts and reproductions of works by comrades from Martinique, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, South America, the United States, and other lands. Some of these publications are readily available to researchers; others are not, and a few fall outside academia’s narrow definition of surrealism.

This collection is the first to document the extensive participation of people of African descent in the international surrealist movement over the past seventy-five years. Editors Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley aim to introduce readers to the black, brown, and beige surrealists of the world—to provide sketches of their overlooked lives and deeds as well as their important place in history, especially the history of surrealism.

Franklin Rosemont, editor of the Surrealist Revolution Series published by the University of Texas Press, was welcomed into the surrealist group in Paris in 1966 by renowned surrealist André Breton. Rosemont has contributed to many international surrealist exhibitions and journals, among them Analogon in Prague and L’Archibras in Paris. Among his books are Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism, Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous, An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers, and Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants.

Robin D. G. Kelley, a distinguished scholar of African American history, is Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis); and, most recently, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.