The album Tom Waits calls “astronaut music from bedlam”
The sonic stylings of Tom Waits are decidedly raw and rugged. This is largely a consequence of his vocals, which are just as genuine as they are gritty. There’s nothing otherworldly about his raspy tones, but there just might be glimpses of a more celestial space in the instrumentation that surrounds them.
Though Waits’ words inevitably push to the forefront of his songs, it’s the unflinching genre experimentation he surrounds them with that elevates them beyond their grounded roots. Waits seems to have no limits to the genres he’s willing to explore, borrowing elements from opera and hip-hop without question.
Before he leant into this kaleidoscopic experimental sound, though, Waits hoped to inhabit the jazz sphere while making his first moves into music in the 1970s. His first few records saw him firmly set in this direction, so it’s no surprise that Waits admires his predecessors in the genre, namely, composer Thelonious Monk.
The sunglass-wearing pianist pre-dated Waits’ ventures into jazz by decades, beginning performing in the 1930s. He had begun to cement his place as a jazz genius by the time the genre experimentalist took up an interest in jazz, and Waits was particularly taken by how simultaneously raw and otherworldly his playing was.
Waits has heaped his words of praise upon the jazz artist. During a conversation with The Guardian, he recalled how some of the pianist’s advice stuck with him as he took up the keys, “Monk said, ‘There is no wrong note. It has to do with how you resolve it.’ He almost sounded like a kid taking piano lessons. I could relate to that when I first started playing the piano because he was decomposing the music while he was playing it.”
It’s easy to see how this philosophy influenced Waits’ own songwriting in its realness and resolution. Waits was particularly enthusiastic about one of Monk’s records, 1965’s Solo Monk, which he declares a favourite of his. “Solo Monk lets you not only see these melodies without clothes, but without skin,” he enthused, “This is astronaut music from Bedlam.”
Marking Monk’s fifth full-length record, Solo Monk really spotlights the pianist’s playing, unshrouded by other instruments or players. It’s a gorgeously stripped-back record, as Waits suggests, allowing his real talent for melody to shine but still containing an astronomical quality. Almost six decades on from its first release, the record still holds up as a work of excellence within the jazz genre, one with Waits’ approval behind it.
Listen to Solo Monk below.
