I love Thelonious Monk more than just about any other musician in history. I enjoy learning and playing his tunes on the guitar, where they tend to sit well. I’m especially proud of my solo guitar arrangement of “Crepuscule with Nellie.” A jazz guitarist named Miles Okazaki, who is enormously better than me, also enjoys working out solo guitar arrangements of Monk. So much so, in fact, that he took it upon himself to record every single Monk tune for solo guitar. All seventy of them!
(Okazaki has also turned his obsessive-compulsive mind to a beautiful guitar book and an invaluable transcription and analysis of Charlie Christian’s solo on “Stompin’ at the Savoy.”)
As if the basic idea of this epic project wasn’t enough, Okazaki also imposed some constraints on himself: he played everything in its original key, and he didn’t use any overdubs or other digital trickery. There’s no question about how impressive this all is. However, “impressive” is not the same thing as “good.” Are Okazaki’s recordings good?
I mean, of course they’re good. Some of them are gorgeous. Okazaki is incapable of playing badly, and Monk tunes are bottomlessly wonderful. “Shuffle Boil” is my favorite–Okazaki nods to Monk’s youthful tapdancing by creating the sound of tapdancing on his strings. However, some of these recordings don’t sound as good as they could. The more uptempo ones, in particular, sound like a guy playing jazz solos with no rhythm section, and I find myself missing the rhythm section. As I listen, I also start asking, why not use overdubbing? Why not play with other people? Why not transpose tunes into guitar-friendly keys so you can drone open strings? In “Blue Monk,” which is in B-flat, Okazaki keeps playing his open E string, and blagh, why? Why not just play the tune in A, or E, or D?
In fairness to Okazaki, let’s say you’re a musician and a Monk fan, and you want to bring something fresh to your interpretation of his music. What more could you possibly add at this late date? You can already hear Monk tunes as Latin jazz, Monk tunes as vocal jazz, Monk tunes arranged for string quartet, and Monk tunes combined with James Brown and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. There are so many Monk tribute albums that NPR felt compelled to make a list of the ones that aren’t terrible. Okazaki’s recording isn’t the first Monk tribute album for solo guitar, and it wasn’t even the only recording of the complete Monk catalog released in 2018. It would seem there is not a lot of juice left in this particular orange.
There’s a similar problem facing anyone who wants to engage other masterpieces from the jazz canon, for example a tune like John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” Does that mean that jazz should be relegated to the museum, or to LARPers like the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra? No, I do not believe this. I believe that there is plenty of fresh musical expression to be found within the jazz canon. However, I also believe that if you want to say something new, you need to do it using the musical vocabulary of the present. Specifically, I think you should do remixes, not more covers. The jazz canon is a body of recordings, not just scores, and we have barely scratched the surface of those recordings’ possibilities.
Monk is a case in point. His tunes are wonderful, but the real magic of his music is his sound. Anyone who can read music or learn by ear can play a Monk composition, but conveying his touch and rhythmic sensibility is another story. Even if you could somehow learn to imitate his piano style exactly, why would you want to? The message of Monk’s music is to sound like yourself, not like Monk. (He’s pointing at the moon; we shouldn’t get too caught up in studying his finger.) On the other hand, if you sample and remix Monk recordings, you can shine new light on his playing by placing it new contexts, by looping and juxtaposing pieces of it, and even by playing it as an instrument yourself by mapping slices to a MIDI controller. Just about any two-bar segment of any Monk recording sounds good when looped over a breakbeat. Monk recorded entire albums of sampling-friendly solo piano, and his unaccompanied intros are also easy to grab and slice up. Hip-hop producers love sampling Monk, especially the Wu-Tang Clan.
Digital manipulation isn’t the only way to creatively engage with Monk’s recordings. You could also record yourself playing instruments along with them. This idea has some precedent. Yusef Lateef recorded himself playing a saxophone solo over a 1927 recording of “In a Little Spanish Town” by The Revelers, and put it on one of his own albums. It was a bold experiment, and it’s one that I’d love to hear more jazz musicians attempt.
How delightful would it be to hear Miles Okazaki playing call and response with Monk himself? I’d love to hear him play over “Functional” or “Round Lights.” Yes, I am aware that there are copyright problems with this idea. But I bet that a forward-thinking jazz label might be open to such a thing.
Another suggestion for Okazaki and other would-be creators of Monk tributes would be to duet with a Steinway Spirio, a super futuristic version of the player piano. Steinway has software that can reconstruct piano performances from audio and video recordings, which Spirio pianos can then reproduce “live” with extreme accuracy. I had the uncanny experience of hearing a Spirio piano recreate a live performance of “Monk’s Mood” in a Steinway showroom. It was especially strange to hear Monk “playing” a perfectly in-tune piano, which he rarely got to do during his lifetime. I have no idea what the copyright status is of a Spirio performance–we’re in new conceptual territory here–but I bet it would be easier to work out than licensing samples.
So far, most of the creative rethinking of canonical jazz recordings has been done by electronic musicians: Madlib’s Shades of Blue album, the Verve Remixed series, uncountably many rap producers. Wouldn’t it make sense for jazz musicians to be doing this too?
Thanks for mentioning Okazaki. I am super impressed. He plays in Monk’s spirit but it’s fresh. Any guitar player will be highly impressed by this stuff. He’s a total innovator imo.
I’m a jazz musician too. My track “Brilliant” above consists of live improvisation on an instrument over a form – it’s just that the instrument is a sampler loaded with single notes from the intro to “Brilliant Corners,” and the form is one I came up with. You’re welcome to dislike my music, but the fact is that it consists of intelligent improvisation. It’s true that I chose to work with the timbre of “Brilliant Corners” rather than its written form. I believe that irreverence toward the compositions of the jazz canon is more in keeping with the spirit of the jazz greats than complete fidelity. Miles Davis couldn’t even be bothered to play the B section of “Well You Needn’t” in the right key. If Monk himself had been similarly reverent toward the composers of all those standards he adapted, then his music wouldn’t have been one eighth as interesting.
The problem with Kenny G’s solo over “What A Wonderful World” isn’t the concept, it’s that Kenny G is terrible. When someone on the level of Yusef Lateef takes the same approach, it can sound amazing. Miles Davis did some improvising over his own recordings, too, you can hear him soloing over a sample of “Shhh/Peaceful” on A Tribute To Jack Johnson. Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” uses samples of Fab Five Freddy, Led Zeppelin and Pharoah Sanders. Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington are doing amazing work with Kendrick Lamar. When jazz was at its peak vitality as an art form, it was in close and constant dialog with mainstream pop. When jazz musicians now choose to live in the past, they impoverish the music intellectually and spiritually.
I would think this creative re-thinking of canonical jazz recordings is of little interest to jazz players who prefer live musical interaction on an actual composed form, with actual live musicians. I, a professional musician with a jazz pedigree, certainly didn’t find it at all interesting to listen to. Monks music is not in tonal bytes, it is in tunes he composed for live improvisation upon the given structures. Loops removed from context and added to a reverb-heavy rock drum track may give cred to those whose chosen vehicle is rap, but please don’t compare it to intelligent jazz improvisation. BTW, improvising over someone’s previously unsuspecting recording is less reputable than publishing solos recorded to Play-Along-Backing tracks (Jazz karioke-at least intended for such practical use (intended for practice for real performance). Kenny G received much scorn from fellow jazzers for appropriating Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘What a Wonderful World’ and superimposing his soprano sax on it for commercial release (see Pat Metheny’s comments on this). Don’t remix, honor the composer and cover without misappropriating or taking out of context his recorded opus.