You can keep collecting modules - ideas about theory - forever. But only one person in a hundred, at most, knows how to make them work together to produce something audiences are going to want to hear more than once.
Coltrane may have been one of those people. But if he was, it was because he was Coltrane.
Most people who play with these ideas aren't. And acquiring more ideas and theories won't change that for them.
Can't find where I read that. I believe it was a Miles Davis biography I read years ago. I know many Jazz greats thought the same of Monk. When you listen to "Monk meets John Coltrain" you can just see the two of them just making the hardest possible way to resolve what each other was doing. It is almost like they played musical dare for the last 9 months and finally gotten to a place where we got that album.
As a saxophonist I really enjoyed playing to his work, but my keyboard friends would get so worked up. Just look at 'round midnight. The key signature and the accidentals make it almost unreadable. Plus sure we can play in any key but certain one's are easier than others and it seem like it was always the key that couldn't make it harder if one tried. It was always known if you shown any weakness in playing keys that everyone else would keep modulating to try and mess you up.
To me Monk = craziest and most intellectually stimulating harmonies of all time. No one has ever played his music and fooled you into thinking it was by Thelonious.
I'd say jazz is really suffering from a lack of artistic content right now, and I believe it's a direct result of years of this kind of prove-your-mathy-badassery-technical-arms-race among jazz musicians. This is what happens when an "island is sinking"- people start pushing others off the sinking island so there is room for themselves. Jazz (and classical) is kinda sinking. Hopefully we can heal from this and get away from analogue versions of computer music (Xenakis) and back to humanity soon. It's funny, the defense against the sinking is causing it to sink faster by being less human, less relevant. Ironic.
But I sure didn't say that people don't get all up into the math of interrelationships in music theory. They do- I would hate for a non-musician to think they had to do that though to understand music. Absolutely not!In fact, I'm just saying that isn't what music is about for me, as a composer-musician. (I want to encourage people to love music, not to feel bullied by the 'difficulty" of its theory)
also: you said, "...He wasn't Thelonious Monk who just played everything in the hardest keys to prove how great he was on piano..."
What? I don't think that's what Monk was doing at all! Monk developed a sonic language all his own. I don't think any keys were hard for him... nor are they for any professional musician. Monk thought in sound texture and color. They are just different sounds. Sometimes you need a freshness or a timbre that a special key provides. Enough jazz music is written in B-flat if you know what I mean.