The Strange Journey of a Lost Thelonious Monk Album
On July 27, 1959, Thelonious Monk entered Nola Penthouse Studios on Manhattan’s 57th Street for a recording session. He was wearing a very strange hat. This was often the case; the enigmatic jazz pianist was known for his bobble hats, trilbies, fur hats, even skullcaps. But this headpiece, a gift from Ghanaian Afro-jazz pioneer Guy Warren, was particularly distinctive: large and round, like “some weird modernistic lampshade,” as the trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton described it. Monk was still wearing it, photos reveal, when he sat down at the piano that day to record music for the soundtrack to the French film Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a racy adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s novel directed by Roger Vadim.
Monk wore many hats in the figurative sense, too: composer, pianist, bandleader, eccentric style icon—and, for a brief moment, film scorer. Les Liaisons Dangereuses was the only film Monk would ever soundtrack. His music, off-kilter and dissonant, helped set the seductive, scandalous mood of the film. And it nearly didn’t happen.
It was a, his legal problems made it impossible for him to travel to France, where the adaptation was being filmed in 1959. Plagued by insomnia and erratic behavior, Monk spent a week in a Massachusetts insane asylum. The music supervisor for the film, Marcel Romano, eventually had to travel to New York to chase him down, with a strict deadline to procure the soundtrack: July 31.
