It's time to celebrate a little with one of the great fruits of American culture: jazz.

Because, beyond our political challenges, this nation has many bountiful gifts to enjoy and cherish.

Thelonius Monk is one of them, a member of the jazz pantheon. And remember, jazz is perhaps America's greatest indigenous muscial gift to the world

From a New York Times review of the 1988 film, "Straight, No Chaser":

"Augmenting the original film are more recent interviews with Thelonious Monk Jr.; the tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse; Monk's longtime manager Harry Colomby; his European road manager Bob Jones, and his friend the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter. From them we learn that Monk remained an enigma even to those closest to him. Thorny and taciturn, with occasional flashes of very dry humor, he was obviously conscious of his mystique and played off of it. But he was also acutely sensitive and moody and perhaps a manic-depressive. Illness eventually made it impossible for him to perform, and he gave his last public performance in 1976, six years before his death. At the time ''Straight, No Chaser'' began to be compiled, he was too ill to be interviewed for the film.

The film's late-60's portions, which document a European tour and also catch Monk playing in clubs and in recording sessions, are some of the most valuable jazz sequences ever shot. Closeups of Monk's hands on the keyboard reveal a technique that was unusually tense, spiky and aggressive. Other scenes show him explaining his compositions and chord structures, giving instructions in terse, barely intelligible growls that even his fellow musicians found difficult to interpret.

The Monk music that courses through the film is extraordinary in its range of feeling. A tumultuous performance of his most famous composition, '' 'Round Midnight,'' suggests a kind of jazz-musical Cubism, while pop songs like ''I Should Care'' are rendered with a biting poignancy."

So sit back and enjoy a documentary that is a time capsule of smoky, brilliant jazz. Many conjecture that Monk was bi-polar, for which there is some evidence in this film.

But if genious is many times associated with bi-polar illness, then surely Monk is evidence of that theory, as "Straight No Chaser" clearly reveals.