Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "Monk’s Art" by Fred Kaplan (©2008 by Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC).

Two of the most exciting jazz concerts I've seen in a long time were the recent Thelonious Monk tributes at Town Hall in New York, and one reason for the thrill—beyond the treat of hearing great music being played live by great musicians—was the sheer surprise that they were great, for tribute concerts tend to be, almost by nature, lame.

Certainly, there's a place for jazz repertory—recitals of the classics—but, with some of those classics, the projects are fraught with doom from the get-go. For instance, Charlie Parker not only invented a new way of playing jazz; he also perfected it. A generation of alto saxophonists latched on to his style, but the best of them knew better than to play his tunes very often, for fear of inviting comparison, inevitably to their detriment.

Musicians who dare devote an entire album or concert to Thelonious Monk are toying with still more dangerous fire. Monk was a completely distinctive pianist. His jabbing dynamics, his jarring cadences, his oddball intervals that seem at once slapdash and preternaturally precise—he was to the keyboard what Picasso was to the canvas, and nobody can play or paint the same way, to the point where it’s a bit crazy to try. Most of those who make the attempt either round off the edges or sharpen them to the point of parody.

The Monk tributes at Town Hall faced a further challenge. Both were commemorating the 50th anniversary of a single concert—Monk's first stab at leading a big band through his music, performed at the same Town Hall in February 1959. The concert was recorded live and released as an album that came to be hailed as a modern masterpiece. How do you duplicate—or otherwise capture "the spirit"—of that? Try to sound too much like Monk and you risk coming off as a pale imitation; try for something too different and you risk being dismissed as insufficiently Monkish.

The first of the two tribute concerts took the former course to an extreme degree. Charles Tolliver, an accomplished trumpeter and arranger who attended the 1959 concert as a teenager, was commissioned to transcribe all the parts (listening over and over to the album, since the original sheet music was lost long ago), put together a 10-piece band, and lead them through a straight re-creation of the event. The musicians were allowed to improvise their solos—this is jazz, after all—but the pianist, Stanley Cowell, was instructed to match Monk’s solos as closely as possible.

Miraculously, Tolliver pulled it off. The concert, which could have been an "academic" exercise, was anything but. The musicians had no doubt listened to the album countless times, but they owned these arrangements, playing them as if for the first time—not too perfectly, not at all stiffly, leaving some space to sway in—and blowing solos that, in some cases, rivaled the originals.

The next night's tribute concert—by Jason Moran and his Big Bandwagon, an octet extension of his Bandwagon trio—took the more adventurous path, seeking not to replicate the original but, rather, to use it as a leaping-off point.

Moran is attracted to conceptual art, meaning that he's fascinated with process as part of the art. This fascination is what’s on display here—a sort of audio-video collage that explores the roots of Monk's concert, of Monk himself, and of the ties that bind his music to Moran's own path to jazz.

In most hands, this would be a formula for twee disaster. But Moran, at 34 (meaning he was born 16 years after Monk’s 1959 concert), is one of the most versatile and imaginative jazz pianists of our time. Moran can play everything and play it brilliantly, preserving the integrity of the source while making it his own. And he does it again in this unlikely postmodern adventure with Monk.

Toward the end of the evening, Moran played Monk's sweet ballad to his wife, "Crepuscule With Nellie." Moran alternated the opening bars with a reverie of his own composition. When the rest of the band came in, the two themes weaved in and out of each other; Moran launched into an improvisation; the horn players devised their own variations on top of that. Meanwhile, a screen displayed some of W. Eugene Smith's photos of Monk in his loft, mixed in with video footage taken recently inside the loft, which is now empty, the camera roaming across the bare wood boards. The sights and sounds swirled together like a kaleidoscope; it had the effect of a dream, a furtive glimpse of a life voyage.

And did I mention that it cooked like crazy?