The 1940s jazz giant Billy Corgan could never connect with: “I’m not as big a fan of his playing”
At first, it might not really seem like the music of The Smashing Pumpkins, or any of their peers and contemporaries, for that matter, has all that much in common with jazz music, but there are some similarities.
Both are highly expressive and personal forms of music that push the boundaries of what else is going on around them. Both reject the expected and push on down their own idiosyncratic paths, come what may.
They’re both the kind of music that you either get or you don’t (personally, I do get jazz and don’t understand the allure of grunge at all). There aren’t many casual fans of either one; you’re either into grunge or you don’t like it, and the same with jazz. And, though it may come as something of a surprise, but Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan likes jazz, and he really likes it.
“I’m really a big West Coast jazz fan”, Corgan recently told Jack Coyne in an interview for Track Star, “I really like that even guys like Charlie Parker went out west and kinda played this more relaxed form of night-timey type jazz”.
Though he shared a love of a disparate and diverse number of names from across the spectrum of jazz, like Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltraine, Jimmy Raney and Charlie Mingus, adding poetically that “jazz is infinite”, it was his love of the West Coast guys that really shone through the most: “Love Oscar Peterson for piano. [Thelonious] Monk of course, amazing composer but I’m not as big a fan of his playing, but I would love to listen to say Oscar Peterson play Monk’s compositions”.
And, Billy Corgan, you’re in luck! Oscar Peterson did, in fact, record and perform at least one Thelonious Monk composition, ‘Round Midnight’. First in concert with Ella Fitzgerald in 1961 and then later on in the studio, with legendary orchestrator Nelson Riddle, in 1963. Peterson also lent his fluid, cascading and masterful piano movements to the song in a moving tribute to Monk later on in the 1980s.
Unfortunately, we’ll never get to know what Thelonious Monk thought of either Billy Corgan’s compositions or his playing, but the giant of piano playing and jazz did once leave us with 25 tips for musicians that are as relevant to those working in his own field as they were to all those who came later, including all those Seattle grunge singers and players.
Number one on the list was “Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time”. Then there were “stop playing all those weird notes, play the melody!”, “make the drummer sound good”, “don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined”, “what you don’t play can be more important than what you do” and, finally, “whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself”.
And, maybe that is, ultimately, why Monk was a true genius. His work might not have been to everybody’s tastes (just ask Billy Corgan), but there was nobody else out there like him.
