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Monk's ArtHow do you pay homage to the inimitable Thelonious Monk?

By Fred KaplanPosted Tuesday, March 10, 2009, at 6:59 AM ET

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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. On his 2002 CD Modernistic—which may be the best solo jazz album of the past two decades—he navigates James P. Johnson's stride-piano style, standard ballads (putting an original spin on "Body and Soul"), hip-hop (Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock"), knotty numbers by Andrew Hill and Muhal Richard Abrams, a piece by Schumann done straight-up … In short, 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. When Monk started planning his big-band concert 50 years ago, he and his arranger, Hall Overton, met frequently in the loft apartment of W. Eugene Smith, one of the 20^th century's great photographers, who was friends with several jazz musicians. (Overton lived in the same building.) In the late '50s and early '60s, many of them used his loft as a space to hang out and rehearse—and Smith tape-recorded everything they said and played.

An obsessive historian named Sam Stephenson has spent the last several years sorting through these tapes, which are archived at the Center of Creative Photography and now also at Duke University—focusing in particular on the ones with Monk and Overton. During a Monk festival at Duke, Stephenson told Moran about these tapes, guided him through some of the highlights, and thus were planted the seeds for this concert, which Moran titled "In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959."

In the middle of Moran's concert, we hear about five minutes' worth of these tapes (with subtitles shown on a screen, as Monk's speech was hard to understand). Monk rarely spoke about his music, yet it's clear from these tapes that he knew precisely what he wanted: Certainly, for these big-band arrangements, the ideas were Monk's; Overton served mainly as a facilitator. For instance, there's a moment when the two are listening to Monk's 1952 trio recording of "Little Rootie Tootie," one of the songs he planned to use, when Monk suddenly suggests that they simply transcribe his piano solo for the entire band—not in call-and-response riffs, or in lush harmonies, but, rather, in unison, letting the tonal colors emerge from the natural timbres of the horns (which included a French horn and tuba as well as the standard saxophones, trumpet, and trombone). Here's the song as played by Monk's trio:

And now as played by his big band.

During his chat with Overton, Monk paces the wood floor; you can hear his footsteps. At one point, he breaks into a brief tap dance. Moran took this bit of sound and repeated it over and over on a tape loop. Then, at the concert, he played "Little Rootie Tootie" on the piano to the rhythm of Monk's dancing. Suddenly it became clear that Monk had been dancing to the song's rhythm. These songs, it seems, were constantly in Monk's head, growing out of the other tangled ideas churning in there. (Monk was deeply eccentric, possibly bipolar, but also a mathematical genius; everything he wrote and played had precise patterns, albeit unconventional ones, like some secret language that only he comprehended.)

At another point in the concert, Moran and his band played "Thelonious" at a very slow and melancholic tempo, while the screen displayed video footage of the fields and forests in Newton Grove, N.C., where Monk's great-grandfather toiled as a slave. The juxtaposition may sound corny on paper, but at Town Hall it was a heart-clutcher. As Moran told me a few days earlier in an interview, "We think of Monk as a contemporary musician, but this history is part of who he is, and what he plays, too."

Toward the end of the evening, Moran played Monk's sweet ballad to his wife, "Crepuscule With Nellie."* He 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, the 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?

Correction, March 10, 2009: The article originally misspelled the title of "Crepuscule With Nellie." (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Fred Kaplan, Slate's "War Stories" columnist, also writes about culture. His book 1959: The Year Everything Changed is due out in June. He can be reached at .

Photograph of Thelonious Monk and Larry Gales courtesy WikiMedia Commons.

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