{"id":17775,"date":"2025-08-23T20:00:47","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T00:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=17775"},"modified":"2025-08-18T21:55:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T01:55:01","slug":"thelonious-monk-straight-no-chaser-1988-charlotte-zwerin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/17775","title":{"rendered":"Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988, Charlotte Zwerin)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Really good rock doc, because the talking heads feel like punctuations to the flow of music instead of vice-versa.  Like most movies, it is 90 minutes long when it could be LP-length, but say la vee.  A musician&#8217;s musician, impenetrable as a person, at least in the movies I&#8217;ve seen.  I first heard him in <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/15685\">another doc<\/a>, his mouth wide open, playing technically-imperfect tunes, immediately striking, a true jazz weirdo.  That movie&#8217;s archive footage was shot in 1969, this one&#8217;s in 1967, both released decades later.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image25\/monk.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>Paul Grimstad for Criterion:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>From the [1967] Blackwood footage, interspersed with other archival film, photographs, new interviews, and narration, Zwerin distilled an hour-and-a-half-long structure not all that different from a Monk composition: jumpy, elliptical, catchy, moving &#8230; As a counterpoint to the archival material, Zwerin shot new footage of pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris (both Detroit natives, like Zwerin) playing through Monk tunes as four-hand duets. We see how much fun they\u2019re having, how generous and congenial their sharing of the music is, and how a Monk song like \u201cWell, You Needn\u2019t\u201d allows for endless elaboration without its melodic outline ever becoming blurred.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Really good rock doc, because the talking heads feel like punctuations to the flow of music instead of vice-versa. Like most movies, it is 90 minutes long when it could be LP-length, but say la vee. A musician&#8217;s musician, impenetrable as a person, at least in the movies I&#8217;ve seen. I first heard him in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,13,1491,2073],"class_list":["post-17775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-criterion","tag-jazz","tag-rock-doc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17806,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17775\/revisions\/17806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}