I wanted to play my own chords. I wanted to create and invent on little jobs.
Thelonious Sphere Monk
It’s easy to forget that one of the originators of bebop had such modest goals in his early years, just as its easy to forget that some of Thelonious Monk’s most mercurial compositions were themselves actual harmonic reconfigurations of pop standards: “I Got Rhythm,” for example, filtered through Monk’s starling, jagged notes and splayed-finger technique, begat “Rhythm-a-ning” and “The Theme.”
No doubt, this is the reason for the plethora of Monk tributes over the years: the pianist's open reharmonizations ensured that those who followed him would use his music as building blocks for their own ideas, and that the ultimate Monk tribute would not be note-by-note traditionalism but explorations that would sound very little like a night at Minton’s Playhouse in 1941. “Monk's songs are condensed compositions that function as riddles, as lessons, and above all as vibrant, swinging music,” says plays monk bassist Devin Hoff. “Each one of them possesses an inner strength and resiliency that can withstand infinite variations and permutations without giving up its form or its content.”
Hoff, along with clarinetist Ben Goldberg and drummer Scott Amendola have built their careers on radical reinterpretations. All three of them make up the rhythm section for Nels Cline’s acclaimed New Monastery/Andrew Hill sextet. Amendola’s groups have re-imagined tunes as diverse as Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s “This Is Sad”, Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression” and Nick Drake’s “One of These Things First”, and he first gained fame playing in T.J. Kirk, a Monk/James Brown/Rahsaan Roland Kirk tribute ensemble with guitarist Charlie Hunter.
TJ Kirk plays Monk’s “Humph” in San Francisco, 1994
Ben Goldberg’s 2006 release the door, the hat, the chair, the fact was a tribute to Goldberg’s mentor Steve Lacy, who himself released several acclaimed Monk tributes in the fifties and sixties, and Goldberg gained prominence by tinkering with Ashkenazi roots music with the New Klezmer Trio. Hoff’s duo Good For Cows with Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith filters creative interpretations of Monk, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman through the indie-punk rock aggressions of Black Flag, The Minutemen, and Minor Threat.
In 2002, Amendola phoned Hoff and Goldberg for a one-off live gig. They wound up forming plays monk, whose first (and at present, only) album add a bit of 21st century weirdness to not just Monk classics (“Reflections,” "Teo," “Boo Boo’s Birthday”) but his more obscure material like “Green Chimneys’ and “Shuffle Boil”—not to mention doing them all pianoless.
Turns out, the eschewing of Monk’s canonical instrument liberated the trio, who developed each piece into an improvisational journey. “Each song is a parable of form, timing, concision and motion," writes Ben Goldberg in the liner notes for plays monk."The musician who investigates this material finds, additionally, a series of interlocking meditations on the fundamentals of melody, harmony, rhythm and form.”
"We've created certain moods for tunes, more than developing set arrangements," Amendola told Jazz Times in 2005. "What really makes the trio its own thing and opens up possibilities is the lack of a chordal instrument. We've all played and listened to Monk so much. You can really study that music for a lifetime."
Read Signal To Noise's review of plays monk.
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Plays Monk displays “Evidence” live at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, 11/14/06
Listen to the whole set here.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR:
plays monk's ACJF set is at 4pm on Sunday, Sept. 6, 2009. See you there!
