Rewind & Play

For some of us it was Thelonious Monk, and not John Cage, who invented silence. His compositions and recordings are suffused with it. “Silence,” John Edgar Wideman once wrote, “a thick brogue anybody hears when Monk speaks the other tongues he’s mastered.” Monk developed the quiet until the songs implied everything that was not there. All of that preceded the quasi-mythical reticence to speak at length and his isolation during the last decade of his life, before his death in 1982. “Who said I retreated to silence?” Wideman has Monk ask. “Retreat hell. I was attacking in another direction.”