Thelonious Monk Solo

[Demetrius Dade]

CoveringDuke Ellington poses a different sort of risk: He composed much of his music with specific band members in mind; other big bands fall short when tackling Ellington's scores, in part because their musicians, while they might be very good, aren't Johnny Hodges or Paul Gonsalves or Cootie Williams.

A few intrepid souls have leapt into the ring with Monk and held their own. In the mid-1990s, Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez put out an album called Panamonk, which, by highlighting (though not overdoing) the suggestive Latin lilt in Monk's music, made us hear Monk in a new, intriguing way. Around the same time, Fred Hersch recorded an all-Monk solo-piano album, called Thelonious, in which he managed to put his own stamp on the music while imbibing a full dose of Monk's spirit. " 'Round Midnight," as Monk first played it in the 1940s, was a haunting, eerie tune.

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.

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