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For the First Time, Thelonious Monk’s Songbook Swings Solo

“I think if Monk was alive, he’d be really, really annoyed with me,” pianist Jed Distler said recently. “He knew exactly how he wanted his music to sound.”

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For the First Time, Thelonious Monk’s Songbook Swings Solo
By
Giovanni Russonello
, New York Times

“I think if Monk was alive, he’d be really, really annoyed with me,” pianist Jed Distler said recently. “He knew exactly how he wanted his music to sound.”

Distler was discussing the latest and most ambitious recording of his career: a full-on reckoning, alone at the piano, with the monumental songbook of Thelonious Monk, roughly 70 pieces in all. And he was admitting, unapologetically, that he had done it his way: making outrageous choices and intentionally bucking the caution with which jazz musicians tend to approach Monk’s tunes.

Over the past few years, small groups have occasionally tackled Monk’s complete songbook, the most referenced body of work in jazz. But until last month, no solo artist was known to have recorded the whole catalog.

Now, two have. Distler’s piano version will be released in the coming months on TNC Recordings. But he was unexpectedly beaten to the punch by guitarist Miles Okazaki, who on Aug. 15 released his Monk compendium, “Work,” on Bandcamp, without fanfare or warning.

Solo is an especially meaningful format for Monk. He came up in the gospel and stride traditions, in which solo piano predominated. Even when playing with a quartet in the busiest years of his career, he used the entire keyboard to symphonic effect — sounding like a solo pianist even as he left big patches of wide-open space.

And when playing other people’s music, solo piano was his preferred method. In his covers of Tin Pan Alley tunes — he did them with tenderness, ardor and humor — he seemed to spend an entire song seeing how rhythmically emphatic he could make the melody feel, but without corrupting its cadence.

The first of its kind, Okazaki’s release sent a stir of excitement through the jazz world. A committed experimentalist who recently ended a decadelong stint with influential musician Steve Coleman, Okazaki had something different in mind than Distler’s irreverence. He wanted to pay dutiful tribute, while also using the Monk songbook to expand his own approach to the guitar.

“It’s like a crystal,” Okazaki said of Monk’s music in an interview. “It’s got all these angles inside of it; it’s not just linear. It’s three-dimensional and there’s counterpoint. And it’s African rhythmically.”

For each of the 70 tunes on “Work,” Okazaki listened closely to a single recording by Monk, homing in on the details. That is in line with the composer’s practice: Monk insisted on teaching his music to bandmates by ear, so they could catch his inflections and emphases.

Okazaki used no overdubs or effects and never changed a piece’s key, time signature or central melody. But he arrived at an engrossing, nearly five-hour collection that sounds entirely new. On his rendition of “Light Blue,” a swaying, mesmeric ballad, Okazaki makes it through the melody twice using only single notes, piquant and quavering, with no chords.

On “Nutty,” he veers toward the traditional — intimating Monk’s stride-piano technique by way of early ragtime guitar, then running through a rising sequence of diminished chords like a bebop guitarist. Throughout the album, especially when Okazaki chucks out fast and syncopated undercurrents on the lowest strings, you can feel the influence of Coleman, whose music draws from across the African diaspora to make a thick-bodied, often unswinging funk.

Distler, on the other hand, said he worked primarily from paper rather than by listening closely to records. He began playing the full Monk book a few years ago in marathon concerts. His style in this repertory is jocular to the point of insouciance — unsurprising, considering his past works include easy-listening interpretations of Beethoven and Brahms, and a string quartet called “Mister Softee Variations.”

Even if you recognize the melodies, Distler’s recordings feel almost nothing like Monk. The up-tempo jounce of “Monk’s Dream” and “Criss Cross” has been turned into surface-skimming, 12-tone dashes, with debts to Cage and Stockhausen. “Bemsha Swing” has undergone a conversion from Caribbean pseudo-blues to slippery, Debussy-influenced glide.

On “Light Blue,” despite the tune’s gentle nature, Monk tended to lean hard on the highest note of each phrase, using it to pivot hard back down. Distler does almost the opposite — he lets that note drift, becoming the top of a gentle arc. Elsewhere in the piece, he waits a little bit less than Monk would have between chords, erasing the potato-sack thwack of syncopation that typically defines the tune. Still, I’m not so sure Distler is right that Monk would come out hard against him. His interpretations are so distant from the originals that I can almost see Monk laughing at the whole thing with bemused satisfaction. Early in the 2000s, German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach became the first to record Monk’s entire oeuvre when his quartet made “Monk’s Casino,” an effort caught, to its detriment, between Okazaki’s purposeful devotion and Distler’s devil-may-care playfulness. Frank Kimbrough, a straight-ahead pianist, recently made his own 70-song collection with his quartet, featuring rather by-the-book readings of Monk’s tunes; that will come out in November on Sunnyside Records.

But Okazaki and Distler are the only known solo completists. Last year, when I attended a festival at Duke University celebrating Monk’s 100th birthday, I was reminded how deeply in touch Monk was with the elements of dance — the physicality and weight of motion. In his solo piano playing, at a halting midtempo, he often sounds like someone learning a step, holding and testing a pose, cogitating.

A heap of Monk tribute discs arrived during the centennial last year, and one that got unfairly buried was Min Xiao-Fen’s “Mao, Monk and Me,” a moving solo album — just seven tunes, not 70 — with outside-the-lines renditions of two Monk classics, “Ask Me Now” and “Misterioso.” Playing the pipa, a Chinese lute, she brought her own history to the pieces while seeming to savor crucial elements of Monk’s genius: his ringing engagement with his instrument’s strings; his percussiveness; his capering between zips and blasts and meaningful silence.

At Duke, I noticed that, while the jazz world is increasingly defined by pluralism — lapping up influences from across the cultural spectrum — Monk’s influence stands tall and firm, a kind of grounding force and perhaps the genre’s closest thing to a unit of artistic measure.

But it’s no coincidence that, as the art form has begun to borrow more from other traditions, the stuff that was once inviolable within jazz is now available for new experimentation. Hence, solo Monk: both Distler’s cheeky humor and Okazaki’s affectionate daring. Take your pick.

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