“Rewind & Play: ‘It’s Not Nice?’,” a new documentary about Thelonious Monk by the French Senegalese director Alain Gomis, remixes raw footage into a devastating ballad of the artist’s erasure.
of the jazz legend, Monk had quite literally walked off his pain, sometimes walking so much that he got sores on his feet. Following the death of his idol Coleman Hawkins, Monk was said to have paced for three days. The cameras capture the wry decorum of a man too generous to pursue escapism wholeheartedly and too intelligent to relish sycophants trampling on his soulfulness in pursuit of his glamour.
Renaud persists, changing the subject to feign mercy. Why does Monk keep his piano in his kitchen, he asks, seemingly anticipating an outlandish pop-spiritual explanation about the energy of the room, a neat anecdote that can be added to jazz mythology. Monk responds matter-of-factly: “That was the largest room in the apartment.” Renaud appears crestfallen. In French, he had added that he’s been to Monk’s “cramped” New York apartment, and inflects the adjective with blunt pathos.
Relentless, Renaud reroutes to another, equally risible line of inquiry. He wants to know if Monk feels that he was “too avant-garde” for the audience at his first concert in France, in 1954. Now Monk is openly indignant: “It seemed like that I was the star the people was coming to see, but I wasn’t getting the money.” Cut! This scene is the source of the film’s subtitle. Having led Monk to acknowledge his own stature, Renaud halts.
Monk stands up and attempts to walk offstage. “How about us going to this dinner and forgetting this TV program?” he stammers, pained, painful to watch. Renaud physically jostles him back toward the bench. For a moment, their clash is a near-embrace, one that stalemates in Monk’s tentative acquiescence. He’s still standing for his third attempt at the question about his first tour in France.
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