
www.youtube.com to view the Thelonious Monk documentary, "Straight No Chaser," Bret Primack's YouTube pick of the week. Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988) is a documentary about the life of Thelonious Monk. Produced by Clint Eastwood, Bruce Ricker, and directed/co-produced by Charlotte Zwerin, it features live performances by Monk and his group, and posthumous interviews with friends and family. The film was created when a large amount of archived footage of Monk was found in the 1980s, A recurrent image in Charlotte Zwerin's remarkable documentary, ''Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser,'' is of the jazz pianist slowly spinning around in what appear to be deliberate attempts to disorient himself. Although the film offers no explanation for this penchant, the picture of the pianist whirling like a child playing games with himself is an apt metaphor for his revolutionary piano style. As the abundant musical soundtrack illustrates, his spare, knotty pianism, with its restless stop-start rhythms and percussive insistence, maintained a perspective on life and art that was defiantly off-center, obsessively exploratory and deeply personal. The core of the 90-minute movie, is taken from 14 hours of black-and-white film shot in the late 1960's by Michael and Christian Blackwood for a cinema verite television special about Monk. Broadcast only once, in West Germany, the program was never shown again. The film resurfaced in 1981 when Mr. Blackwood and Bruce Ricker, the co <b>...</b>
Thelonious Monk
Straight No Chaser
Bret Primack
Jazz Video Guy
Clint Eastwood
Charlie Rouse
Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter
Round Midnight
Blue Monk
Epistrophy
Jazz
Video
Guy