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Posts Tagged ‘Thelonious Monk’

Day 111. Thelonious Monk.

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

One of my favorite parts of taking jazz improv classes (which I really only did for a few years at the community college level) was that at some point in the semester we would usually end up watching the Thelonious Monk documentary ‘Straight, No Chaser’. It is a great documentary, and I think I saw it 5-6 times in school. (As a quick aside, the other film that would find its way into the curriculum of many classes was the James Baldwin documentary ‘The Price Of The Ticket’, which I also saw 5-6 times… I don’t say this in any way as a complaint… Both of these are amazing documentaries, and if there are any two films every undergraduate should see 5-6 times in the pursuit of their Bachelor’s degree these are the two).  Monk’s story was amazing, and whether or not he had mental illness to overcome (never confirmed though highly suspected), there can be no mistake that he was a musical genius. The intricacy and complexity of his playing rewards multiple listenings. At first you may be drawn to the sharply angular melodies or sharp syncopations. After another listen or two, your ear may start to recognize bits and pieces of the original melody, displaced by octaves and stretched or shrunk on the fly. And one of the most amazing things I tend to find in Monk’s playing is his impeccable timing… he knows when to stop and let the others play (usually so he could stand up and dance). It may seem quirky, but just about everything he played was very musical and very deeply thought out, even if the amount of time allowed for the thought was only a few moments.

And though I say above that the documentary is an amazing thing to see (even over and over again), it is also a little depressing. After spending a few weeks learning scales and how to play over different changes (and taking your 2 chorus turn when you were pointed to) we would be shown this video. Why, oh why, would an instructor do this to us? To crush our spirits? Show us what can’t really be attained? Because there was at least once or twice that this happened to me. Here I’ve been, with my saxophone or guitar for a few weeks, trying to become a better jazz improvisor, and then I’m shown videos of Thelonious Monk operating at a musical level that I imagine no one in that room could operate at. But what I finally got out of that video is that while we certainly can’t be Monk, there really isn’t anyone else that can be either. I’m not sure if this was something we were supposed to figure out on our own or not, or even if our instructor that this, but I think the point was that if we are going to make any mark in music, we need to figure out what our voice is going to be, then practice our art every day after that.

The problem with that kind of thinking is that it seems like these are clear cut steps. And there certainly aren’t. The more I’ve thought about it actually, it seems like you are supposed to cycle through these steps many many times. If you don’t, you get stuck, possibly too smoothed out. Not that you shouldn’t try to refine what you do, but if you aren’t re-exploring all the time either, chances are you aren’t experimenting either. There is music among the Thelonious Monk discs I ripped tonight that spans over three decades. And what it seems to me that Monk was able to do was find an excellent balance between these two extremes. Monk sounds like Monk in the 40s and in the 60s. He gets to play with most of the greats (but at the same time the greats got to play with him). And you can tell that he is listening and absorbing what he is hearing, and conversing with them all.

For the past few weeks, there has been a double bass in the window of a pawn shop here in Tacoma, and every time I have driven by it I have been tempted to take a look at it and see how much it is. While I play other instruments, bass is still the only one I probably can see myself getting back to performance level with again (over a few years to be sure). But yesterday, it was gone. I have other stories about instruments that I have seen in stores (some even that I worked in) that one day just disappears. Now – I certainly don’t have the money to just plop down and buy good instruments (assuming this was a good bass… a stretch I’m sure), but at the same time a number of these opportunities have passed me by and I begin to realize how much I miss performing. I should start to think about how to do that again. And soon. Because I think one of the things my composing needs more then anything else right now is my ear hearing what others do first hand again. Hearing Monk again playing with John Coltrane helped remind me of this.

Day 20. Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

‘Time Out’ was one of the first jazz discs I ever heard (my dad had it on record). I also remember learning ‘Take Five’ by ear in the living room of my house as a teenager one afternoon when no one was home. I had been playing alto sax for a little more then a year after 4 years of clarinet. I love the clarinet now and wish I had kept playing it more, but at the time I felt like I was moving up to a cool wind instrument! I was a teenage boy and I just didn’t see the girls going for a myopic clarinetist with a bad hair. A myopic saxophonist with bad hair though had a chance. Anyways, my first memories of hearing ‘Time Out’ come closely on the heals of hearing ‘Blue Train’ and ‘Kind of Blue’, and I had no problem telling people at this point that I liked jazz. And I REALLY did get into jazz at this point. One thing that surprises me a little now though is how well ‘Kind Of Blue’ and ‘Blue Train’ still stand up for me.

While there are some great tracks on ‘Time Out’, the album seems much blander and run of the mill to me now. I heard ‘Blue Rondo A La Turk’ streaming out of a car the other night at the Tacoma Dome while waiting for the girls to pick me up. KPLU plays a lot of Brubeck. In fact, a couple years ago they did a ‘greatest 100 jazz albums of all time’ countdown, and I heard probably the top 10… when they got to number 2 and started to play ‘All Blues’, I was seriously stumped about what could possibly be number 1. Then they introduced ‘Time Out’ and played ‘Take Five’. Now, it is a good song and a good album… but better then Miles Davis with John Coltrane? This moment summed up for me how serious KPLU was about its jazz programming… if ‘Time Out’ is the greatest jazz album of all time in their eyes then … well, there just isn’t a polite way of saying how off these guys are. And for the most part listening to KPLU is like listening to the clean, sanitized version of jazz. It isn’t playing the smooth jazz that KKSF in San Francisco is known for, but it certainly isn’t playing the out there late Coltrane stuff either. It’s nice, safe middle ground jazz for public radio listeners.

I was actually talking to a friend a few months ago about why ‘Blue Train’ and ‘Kind of Blue’ still work for me, but ‘Time Out’ doesn’t. And I think it goes back to that afternoon I spent figuring out ‘Take Five’… I was able to figure it out. The whole album, as it explores different meters, is actually quite rigid. There are times when it swings, but even then it is a VERY controlled and precise swing. I was able to get it down. But the nuance, phrasing and feeling on the Coltrane record and on ‘Kind of Blue’ is all very subtle with slight give and take all over the place. I could spend some time writing all the notes down to learn them, and I am sure I still couldn’t capture what is happening on those discs (especially since, if I could play EXACTLY what is on those recordings I would be missing out on a huge part of what that musical tradition is!). And I think that is one of the reasons they still keep my attention so strongly. They ARE jazz classics, quite popular and accessible. But there is SO much more once you get beyond that level. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how deep I feel the Brubeck disc is. Some nice songs, and I think the group plays amazingly well together. But I don’t feel an excitement over it any more.

The Art Blakey discs however are just damn amazing. While I wouldn’t expect to hear either of these in a Top 10 (the discs tonight were ‘A Night In Tunisia’ from the Rudy Van Gelder Series and a Jazz Messengers disc with Thelonious Monk) they feature some exhilarating performances. The Monk disc is just lots of fun. Blakey and Monk are basically passing on tradition to some younger sidemen… something that Art Blakey in particular would spend so much of his career doing.

The ‘A Night In Tunisia’ disc features Lee Morgan and a young Wayne Shorter. I once heard a story about Dizzy Gillespie where he was trying to explain how him and Charlie Parker thought about bop music. He said that they just wanted to play faster then any one else could so they couldn’t be imitated. This Art Blakey version, I imagine, would have made Dizzy’s jaw drop. When I got the disc I noticed the title track was over 11 minutes long, and I assumed it was a more relaxed version of the tune. It turned out that it is really a 20 minute version that is played at double speed. It is a roller coaster of a recording and the playing is almost unbelievable. Except there it is… in 1960 you couldn’t fake this kind of playing.