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Solis reaches well beyond the usual life-and-times biography to address larger issues in jazz scholarshipethnography and the role of memory in history's construction. Gabriel Solis shows how the work of this stubbornly nonconformist composer emerged from the jazz world's fringes to find a central place in its canon. This pathbreaking study combines cultural theory, biography, and musical analysis to shed new light on Monk's music and on the jazz canon itself. As a composer, pianist, and bandleader, Monk both extended the piano tradition known as Harlem stride and was at the center of modern jazz's creation during the 1940s, setting the stage for the experimentalism of the 1960s and '70s. Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was one of jazz's greatest and most enigmatic figures. I argue that this latter understanding offers a necessary critique of conceptions of the past and of self and other found in the dominant Western worldview. Jason Moran’s “In My Mind,” however, offers a different understanding of the past, one rooted in ambiguity and connection rather than delineation and separation. This tradition is based in an epistemology that privileges objectivity, logic, boundaries, and an obsession with naming while suspecting the subjective and what cannot be named. This article analyzes two approaches to the jazz past undertaken recently under the aegis of “jazz reenactment”: Mostly Other People Do the Killing’s 2014 release of Blue (a note-for-note re-performance of the Miles Davis Sextet’s 1959 album, Kind of Blue) and Jason Moran’s multi-media re-visiting of Thelonious Monk’s 1959 Town Hall Concert, “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959.” I contend that rather than an ironic critique of the canonization of jazz, Blue is a direct product of the same tradition of understanding the past that informs such canonization.