Sao Paulo - The IASJ Meeting (Part 2)

The second part of my report on the recent IASJ meeting in Sao Paulo in July 2011. For part one go here


Day 4

Today is a very Brazilian kind of day – it begins and ends with Choro.

Opening up the day we’re treated to an explanation and demonstration of Choro music by Pedro Ramos, one of the teachers at Souza Lima, our host school. Choro is a wonderful music typically played by at least two guitars (a small one called a Caviquinho, and a big 7-string guitar), one or more melody instruments (saxophone, clarinet, or flute usually) and Pandeiro – the Brazilian tambourine. It dates to the early part of the 20th Century and is sometimes described as Brazil’s Ragtime. It is full of counterpoint and the voice-leading prowess of a good Choro player is really something to behold – the 7-string guitar acts as a bass, but a constantly moving bass, playing wonderful obbligato lines underneath the melody. In fact the way the melody and accompaniment switch back and forth between the different instruments is in itself reminiscent (in terms of instrumental roles rather than sound) of traditional jazz. But the rhythms are unmistakably Brazilian, with that slightly behind, triplet-y samba so unique to the music of this country. Pedro also gave a handout that outlined the racial history of Brazil and how the very striking variety of races and skin colour that one sees in Brazil came about and how unique to Brazil that was.


(Pedro Ramos Group)

After we’ve all been uplifted by the Choro music we go to Masterclass again and this time Herbie Kopf takes the helm and has some great things to say about dealing with sound issues in venues of different types and also some very valuable stuff on practice techniques. The students weigh in with some great stuff too – questions and suggestions. This is exactly what IASJ Masterclasses are about – the sharing of ideas rather than stuff being handed down in a hierarchical way. In the afternoon, more student rehearsals and ongoing dialogues for the teachers, and then in the evening we go off to finish the day with the same music we started it with – Choro, and the legendary Ó Do Borogodó club.

Ó Do Borogodó is a unique place – small, very basic, with a tiny bar and space for maybe 100+ people, but it is THE place in Sao Paulo to go and hear Choro and other Brazilian music, and dance. Every time I’ve been to Sao Paulo I’ve come to this club, and every time it’s been great – the vibe is extraordinary. The gig starts at around 10.30, and it’s usually packed out. There are tables and chairs on the floor, but usually these gradually disappear as the dancers commandeer all available space and the music really gets going. The musicians sit behind a table, which acts both as something to place their drinks on and as a barrier to keep the dancers from actually falling on top of them! Another interesting thing is the age of the dancers – it’s totally mixed, with young and older people dancing together unselfconsciously – no age apartheid here!

And these musicians really work! Their first set will usually be almost 2 hours long, then they take a break and play for another two hours, finishing after 3am – it’s reminiscent of jazz in the old jazz club days in that respect. And the music has an insistent quality to it, where the intensity level gets raised over a period of time and just goes and goes. A singer will usually join them after a while and then the dancers really get going, singing along to the Anthemic choruses of these songs and just having a great time. What amazes me about this place is that it is totally packed, with no room to move for anybody – dancers, staff, musicians - but the vibe is universally good humoured with no sense of any annoyance or suggestion that things could get ugly. And this is at 3am - in Europe and the US, late night places that sell alcohol are usually places to avoid in the small hours – but not here.

Here’s a video I shot in Ó Do Borogodó, but not on the night in question (there were too many people there that night to film – the locals were astonished to arrive and find the place already packed with jazz musicians at 9.30pm!) - I shot this a few weeks before the IASJ meeting on a previous visit, but it gives a good idea of how the music sounds and what a great vibe this is.



Day 5

A relaxed day – traditionally at IASJ meetings the middle day of the meeting week features a trip of some kind which introduces the participants to some aspect of the city or area that we’re in – something they wouldn’t be able to experience anywhere else. On this occasion the host school has organised a trip to nearby Santos Beach - birthplace of Pele! Since Brazil is synonymous with beach life (at least in the minds of non-Brazilians!), this seems like a great trip to do. However, it being winter here at the moment, and the weather has been cold, I decide discretion is the better part of valour and skip the trip in favour of rehearsing a little with Carlos and George (we have a couple of gigs at the end of the week), and doing some school work on the computer.

After dinner the second jam session of the week is organised for a nice club called Ao Vivo – after the spit and sawdust vibe of Ó Do Borogodó the night before, Ao Vivo seems positively opulent! Before the jam session itself, Marcelo Coelho’s group plays a set of his rhythmically involved compositions for soprano sax, trombone, bass, drums and percussion. The difficult music is very well played and Emilio Martins’ percussion playing is particularly impressive.

After Marcelo’s set, the jam session starts and this time, after my previous experience, I decided not to bring my instrument. However I again make a strategic error since this time there are much less people here because the bus taking a lot of the participants to Santos developed mechanical problems and is very late getting back. So this time I could easily have played if I’d brought my instrument, but I didn’t and console myself by having a great time listening to Herbie Kopf, and American expat and SP resident, drummer Bob Wyatt swinging the band into bad health on two pieces! It’s a pleasure to hear a great bassist and drummer really lock in together and drive the band along – listening to Herbie and Bob is almost as much fun as playing! Almost.......


(Lieb playing at the jam session)

At the end Lieb turns up and plays two tunes with one of the teachers and two of the students – ‘Milestones’ and ‘I Hear A Rhapsody’ get the Lieb treatment – total commitment to the music, everything stretched almost (but only almost) to the point of the dissolution of the form. Always great to see him playing standards..... There is a bit of controversy when the student playing the piano, visibly displeased with his own playing, abruptly leaves the stage after the first tune, the keyboard then being ably taken over by Cliff Korman, author of a fine book on the Brazilian Rhythm Section.

The night ends up being a late one due mainly to the length of time it takes to pay the bar tab – they have a very inefficient system where you’re given a card at the beginning of the night and the drinks you get are marked on it. At the end of the night you pay the tab – but of course when the music ends then everyone tries to pay at the same time so a huge queue forms and it takes more than 45 minutes for everyone to pay, and then we have to get on the bus and be taken back to the hotel, so it’s after 2am by the time we get back.

Day 6


We’re at the business end of the Meeting now – literally and figuratively. The business of the IASJ is taken care of at the General Assembly which takes place in the afternoon – the housekeeping of the organisation is dealt with including the venues for upcoming meetings (Graz in Austria in 2012, Denmark in 2013, and very excitingly, Cape Town in South Africa in 2014).

But before all of that, in the morning there is another lecture and another Masterclass. The lecture is given by Emilio Martins and some colleagues on Afro-Brazilian rhythms and it’s just fantastic! The sheer variety of styles and approaches demonstrated is amazing and also gives the lie to the idea that Brazilian music is only about Samba or Baossa Nova. The guys switch effortlessly from one regional style to another and the whole thing is a revelation to all of us.


(Emilio Martins and group)

At the Masterclass, due to some confusion in scheduling, I am the only teacher there and so I spend some time talking about, and demonstrating, the benefits of playing solo bass – solo bass as opposed to bass soloing – i.e playing on your own and figuring out ways to make that work so that the music rather than the instrument becomes paramount. I demonstrate some techniques and ways of thinking about it and we get into some very interesting discussions about this and related topics. A very nice way to finish the Masterclass series.

So that evening, the empirical evidence of the value of the IASJ meeting is on display – the student concerts. Tonight is the first one, featuring three groups, with the other three performing on the following night. The gig takes place in a nice theatre about 30 minutes away by bus. I while away the journey by having a great conversation with Francois Théberge about the history of Ireland and Francois’ native Quebec. On arrival we find that Lieb has been struck down with severe laryngitis and will not be able to do his normal MC role for the student concerts, though he will be at the concerts. However his place is ably taken by his daughter Lydia and she does a great job of introducing all the groups and telling the audience about the IASJ. As usual the concert itself is full of good music and it’s amazing to hear how well these young musicians play together only 5 days after their first meeting......

Barry, the student I brought with me, performs with his group tonight and does very well – the band is a killer (see the video clip at the end) and they bring the evening to a suitably spectacular close.

I haven’t seen much of Barry since we arrived, just brief chats here and there - and that’s how it should be at these meetings. He’s been off hanging with the other students, making friends and connections and talking incessantly about music, as have I................


(Student Concert)

Day 7

The final day and it begins with the traditional Lieb rousing speech to the troops! Every year Dave talks directly to the students, encouraging them, cajoling them, making them realise what a special thing they’ve become involved with by choosing to play this music at this level. He gives them practical advice as well as a lot of philosophical stuff to chew on. I’ve heard versions of this speech about 20 times now and I never tire of it! It’s always inspiring and send the stiudents off in high spirits and full of determination and the will to win. And I always hear something new or something I hadn’t noticed him say before – this year it’s about how the difference between a good player and a great player is how the great players take care of ALL ‘the details’. And how right he is.......

The fact that he manages to give this talk despite his ongoing laryngitis problem is amazing, but after the meeting he asks me if I will go and sound check with the students for the final concert tonight, since he’s not feeling up to it. So, after a farewell reception, off we go to the theatre at 5pm – earlier than last night and what was a 30 minute journey the previous evening turns into one more than an hour long due to the heavier traffic at the earlier time. SP has 5 million cars and tonight I think we were on the road with at least 3 million of them........ The soundcheck is relatively painless thanks to the amazing Jesse – (the guy who seems to look after EVERYTHING at Souza Lima – from the sound in a huge theatre, to getting a glass of water for Lieb during his morning speech – what a guy!) and also thanks to the help of Carlos Ezequiel who blends his musician’s knowledge with an ability to speak Portuguese to great effect. Pretty soon the job is done, time for a quick dinner and then the final three concerts.


(Me and the amazing Jesse!)

Again, great music, great playing, great spirit – to see these young musicians, from all over the world, communicating together through the medium of jazz is truly touching.

After the concert comes the 'long goodbye' where everyone says goodbye to everyone else - with more than 200 people involved, this can take a while! I manage to get a photo opportunity with Dimos Dimitriades from Greece and Bruno Santos from Portugal. Our three countries are currently in hock to the International Monetary Fund to the tune of about 400 billion Euro, so we dub ourselves the 'IMF Trio' - the world's most expensive jazz group!


(Bruno, Dimos and I - the IMF Trio!)

The IASJ Meeting is a truly wonderful event – every one is different but each meeting has one thing in common – a demonstration of the true spirit of jazz – creativity, generosity, individuality, collective spirit. It is a musical language that started in America but is now truly international. To see the proof of all of that – watch the clip below - The full personnel is:

Darren Craig English - Trumpet (University Of Cape Town, Cape Town,South Africa)
Kasperi Sarikoski - Trombone (Paris Conservatoire/Sibelius Acdemy, Helsinki, Finland)
Florian Wempe - Tenor Saxophone (Royal Conservatory, Den Haag, Netherlands)
Kaneo Ramos - Guitar (Souza Lima Conservatorio, Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Christian Li - Piano (Berklee College of Music, Boston, USA)
Barry Donohue - Bass (Newpark Music Centre, Dublin Ireland)
Ariel Tessier - Drums (Paris Conservatoire, Paris, France)


Barry Donohue's 'Anti-Matter' at the IASJ... by NewparkMusic

Sao Paulo - The IASJ Meeting (Part 1)

I recently attended the International Association of Schools of Jazz Meeting at the Conservatorio Souza Lima in Sao Paulo. The IASJ is an organisation which is the brainchild of the great saxophonist Dave Liebman who in 1989 contacted a group of people from around the world who were involved in jazz education with a view to forming an organisation that would allow for the free-flowing exchange of ideas, students and teachers between schools that teach jazz. I was one of the people who sat in that room in Germany over 20 years ago, and I’ve seen the organisation grow into what it is today.

The jewel in the crown of the organisation is the Annual Meeting which takes place in a different country each year, and in which schools of the organisation send teachers, students and representatives to meet for a week, exchange ideas, do masterclasses and have the students play together and play a concert together at the end of the week. It’s an amazing week and one that really emphsises the notion of jazz as an international musical language.

These are some of my memories and impressions of this year’s meeting...............



Day One

Arrived with my student Barry Donohue (a very talented young bassist) in the early hours after the long Dublin-London-Sao Paulo flight – it’s winter here , but in Sao Paulo that means a pleasant 17 degrees even at this ungodly hour. Sao Paulo is HUGE – it has more than 20 million people and more than 5 million cars, and is a city with little architectural merit. But its real treasure is its people who are just fantastic – friendly and laid-back in a way that is extraordinary considering what a huge Metropolis they live in and how stressful it must be to live in such a huge place.

I left Barry to go to the student hotel with some other arriving students and went to my own hotel. Lucky enough to get into the room early (7am) and decided to go down and have a quick breakfast. Of course this being the IASJ, of which I’ve been a member for more than 21 years, the ‘quick’ breakfast turns into anything but as I run into so many friends. The internationalised nature of jazz these days becomes really clear from the composition of the assembly at the breakfast table – Mike Rossi of the University of Capetown, Gary Keller from Miami, Micu Narunsky (a very old friend of mine who was a fellow student with me at the Banff jazz workshop way back in 1986!) from Israel, George Kontrafouris from Greece and Martin Mueller from the New School in New York. All are great musicians with the exception of Martin, who is not a musician but has very dedicatedly and successfully lead the New School’s jazz programme for more than 20 years. So a couple of hours are spent catching up and by the time I get to the room I’ve got a very impressive level of exhaustion which can only be partly alleviated by a couple of hours sleep.

The afternoon is spent taking care of some logistics for myself and trying to deal with hotel bureaucracy for Barry at his hotel, where extraordinarily for such a big hotel in such a big city, nobody speaks any English..... Then it’s off to the celebratory opening concert, the legendary Brazilian singer and guitarist Guinga playing with the equally legendary Dave Liebman (who is the Artistic Director of the IASJ and the guy whose idea it all was back in in ’89) and Marcelo Coelho on saxophones, a great saxophonist from Sao Paulo, and the founder member along with me and my brother Conor of IRSA). There’s a 6pm call for the bus to take the delegates to the gig, but the bus gets stuck in the traffic snarl and eventually Mario – the founder and director of our host school - in an an incredibly generous and expensive move, hails a fleet of taxi to take almost a hundred people to the concert.


(Lieb and Guinga)

The gig itself is packed and for me, sitting there a bit jet-lagged, it brings home to me again what a great player Liebman is. All the material is comprised of Guinga’s downbeat yet harmonically rich lyrical songs, and Dave plays them with him with extraordinary sensitivity while sounding completely like himself. He plays piano, soprano and a little wooden flute, and what he plays is just magical. Talking afterwards with some of my musician friends we all agree that Dave has been around for so long and has played so consistently great in all that time, that it’s easy sometimes to almost take him for granted, but on a night like tonight you’re reminded of just how great he really is. Marcelo Coelho plays some beautiful soprano saxophone on a couple of pieces also.

Myself George Kontrafouris and two great Brazilian musician friends of ours – Lupa Santiago and Carlos Ezequiel– finish the evening in a Churascarria one of those temples of grilled meat that are a Brazilian speciality – you sit at the table and they just keep bringing you a multitude of different kinds of perfectly cooked meat until you beg them to stop! It’s a vegetarian’s nightmare and a recipe for meat poisoning, but as a devoted carnivore I have to say I felt it was the perfect way to end the day.

Day 2

Jetlag........ Awake at 5am SP time. Gave up the struggle to sleep after a while and got up and did various killing-time things until the hotel restaurant opened for breakfast. It’s cold today! A brisk 11 degrees – not what one traditionally associates with Brazil.......

This morning is the first day proper of the meeting, and it begins with a few opening remarks from Liebman and Mario – the school director here, and then goes on to the ‘auditions’. These are not really auditions, but are a way for us to get the hear the students play and for the students to hear each other play. So the students play together - it’s like a jam-session format – pick a tune and off you go. As usual, since each school sends their best students, the standard is very high, with a couple of students being outstanding, most of the others being very good and a couple slightly weaker but no major problems.

When it’s over Dave and I sit down together and put the ensembles together. Since the standard of the students is broadly similar this is an exercise in internationalisation – we try and mix the ensembles by country to ensure that the students get a real cosmopolitan experience and have a chance to work together for a week with colleagues from many different countries. Dave’s original idea for this all those years ago was to form ‘a real United Nations of jazz’ - and this is pretty much what it is except without the factionalism, power struggles and incessant bickering! Each ensemble has a pair of teachers working with them – not teaching them as such, but working with then to make sure everything’s working effectively. Once the ensembles get going the teachers melt into the background and leave them to it.

The students go to their ensembles after lunch, and the teachers who are not working with ensembles the representatives go to the ‘ongoing dialogues’ forum – a meeting to discuss various pedagogical issues relating to the teaching of jazz.

After that the teachers get together to put together the ‘Teacher’s Concert’ - a chance for us to play with each other, and to play for the students. Various teachers will put together bands and ask other teachers to play with them. This is always fun, but of course there’s almost no rehearsal time so the material has to be practical and have the possibility of being put together in a short space of time.

After dinner it’s jam session time – I hum and haw about whether to go, and whether to bring my bass. I decide (foolishly) on doing both those things and the bus takes us to the jam session place which of course is jammed (no pun intended), and a) there is no way I’ll be able to play a tune unless I’m willing to fight my way onto the stage – which I’m not – and b) there’s nowhere to safely leave my bass either, so I have the cumbersome object with me for the whole two hours of the session before getting the bus back. I should have listened to my wiser self earlier, who was urging me to at least not take the bass. We live and learn – or in my case, not..................

Day 3


(Antonio Adolfo)

This morning the great Brazilian pianist and educator Antonio Adolfo starts the day with a wonderful lecture on the rhythmic underpinning of Brazilian music – it’s erudite, informative and delivered in a wonderfully soft spoken way, leavened with gentle wit.

Following this we have Masterclass in which the instrumentalists group together by instrument – all the bassists in one room, all the drummers in another etc. Since the IASJ meeting isn’t a typical workshop, and each school sends a teacher, it’s never clear how many teachers of a particular instrument there are going to be until arrival day. Sometimes there are many piano teachers, sometimes only one etc. This year there are about 8 drum teachers, so they have to work carefully together to give the masterclass a decent structure. As for bass, this year it’s just me and the wonderful Herbie Kopf from Lucerne, so it’s a relatively simple matter to organise the masterclass between us.

It helps that the students are a very nice bunch of people too and very receptive – there’s a theory that I’ve heard that says that certain personalities are drawn towards certain instruments, and while I know this is a highly debatable idea, I must say I do find that bassists as a rule are very easy going people and quite generous. And I think these are qualities that you need as a bassist – if you’re a nervous, narcissistic, egotistical bassist, you’re unlikely to get much work! Over the 20+ years I’ve been attending the IASJ meetings there have been occasional conflicts of ego among students, but these rare conflicts have never involved any bassists. Of course we all know a bassist who may not fall into the ‘nice guy’ category, but I think there’s enough evidence there to at least start a damn good argument on the band bus about the personality=instrument theory!

One of the students asks me about playing in odd metres, so I give a little demonstration of some strategies for that and we try a few things out together. The Masterclass continues with discussions of various other topics and eventually a little duet between two of the students – it’s been a nice way to start.

(Teacher's Concert)

Since this concert is one night only there are always a lot of groups. These concerts are also marathons...... Tonight there were 13 groups playing! Each one played for about 10 minutes, so if you add in time between pieces for the groups to set up (very quick actually) and a few announcements – well, you can do the maths yourself, but it was long! But good. This year (naturally) there was a real Brazilian influence on the music and a lot of energy in general, which kept things moving along nicely. I play with three different groups, all fun – the last is one I put together myself consisting of Francois Théberge (tenor), Mats Holtne (guitar), Dimos Dimitriadis (alto), George Kontrafouris(piano) and Carlos Ezequiel (drums). Carlos and George are of course my partners in crime from the tour of the Far East we did last year and it was great to hook up with them again. We play a piece of mine called ’Traditional’ , a time-no-changes piece based on lots of different bebop-type motifs put together in an unusual way. It was a lot of fun and finished the evening off with a rabble-rousing finale!

For part two go here

Give the Drummer Some!

I originally wrote this post over a year ago, and also posted it on my website, but having recently listened to yet another multitude of drum solos over vamps, I thought it might be useful to re-publish it in the hope of putting some ideas out there that might be helpful for musicians who want to feature the drums as a solo instrument and are interested in putting a different wrinkle on it.....


For one reason or another, I’ve been listening to a lot of concerts and performances in recent weeks. And one thing I've heard SO many times in all kinds of contexts, is the drum solo over a vamp. Time was when the drummer’s soloing opportunities were limited to trades with the horns, or maybe a solo at the end of the night or on the obligatory burner at the end of the set or performance. This came to be seen as a cliché and other ways were sought to include the drums as a solo instrument without going to the obvious trades/solo option. Enter the solo over the vamp.

I'm not sure when this entered the vocabulary of jazz musicians -- I can think of Billy Cobham soloing over complex vamps with the Mahavishnu Orchestra back in the early 70s, but it was probably done before that, no doubt an enlightened reader can fill in the gaps for us. But only in the last 20 years or so that this become really ubiquitous, and is a stock in trade of most bands in contemporary jazz. And it’s only when you listen to as many performances back to back as I have in recent weeks that you realise that the solo-over-vamp thing has become as big a cliché in itself as the drum breaks/big solo was before it.

This is not to say that the drum solo over a vamp is not an effective device – it is and, like the drum break/big solo before it, it’s precisely because it is so effective that it’s become so ubiquitous and now somewhat tired. So is there a way to incorporate the drummer as a soloist in a piece without resorting to either of these rather overused devices? Here are a few suggestions:

1) Drum Breaks.

As usual it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel in order to come up with something fresh to do – just a bit of finessing of what’s already there can often yield interesting results. Take the ubiquitous drum break for example – drum breaks are still a cool idea, it’s just that they’re always done in the same way – i.e after all the other solos are finished. But here’s a suggestion: Let’s say you’re playing a changes/form kind of piece, (could be swing or not) why not have each soloist begin their solos with a chorus of exchanges with the drums? So each soloist will start with 8s (or whatever) with the drums for a chorus (or two depending on the form length), then continue with their own solo, the next soloist in turn will do exchanges with the drums and then continue on with their solo and so forth. In this way the drummer gets to both play and interact with the soloists yet the breaks are more incorporated into the structure of the piece than in the traditional way.

2) Drum Solo

Again this is just a variation on what’s already done. So if we imagine again it’s a traditional form piece, why not have the drummer play a solo chorus in between each soloist rather than a big solo at the end? Once again this will make the drum solo into a more holistic element of the overall piece and give the drummer a lot of material to work with since he/she will be soloing after more than one soloist. Each soloist in turn will be given a lift into their own solos by the preceding drum solo.

If the piece is less conventional, then other ways to incorporate this drum solo as interlude idea can be brought into place. So if the piece is multi-tempo’d for example, the drums could set up the new tempos with some solo improvised passages, or announce the different sections with a small solo section.

3) Solo Over Vamp!

The very cliché that started this train of thought can also be used in a fresh way – like so: Let’s imagine that you’re playing a piece at a brisk tempo – 200 or above – and you want to give the drummer a solo over a rhythmic vamp....... Well instead of playing the vamp over and over again while the drummer plays over the top of it, why not have a few members of the band (3 at most – any more than that and it can get messy), come in and out, and play any section of the vamp at any time? In this way it becomes a very playful thing with nobody knowing which part of the vamp will be played by any one of the players. It’s more challenging too for the players since everyone has to keep the vamp in mind at all times in order not to get lost!

4) Duets

Have the drummer solo with somebody instead of on his/her own, a series of duets (or at least one), probably (though not necessarily), without bass can be both stimulating for drummer and other soloist alike and also create a fresh texture for the ears of the audience.



5) Write longer sections for the drummer to solo over

Instead of writing a bare vamp for the drummer to play over, why not write something a bit more involved? This can be particularly nice in a slower tempo piece where drum solos are rarely heard. If you have a good creative drummer there’s no reason why they should only be given a chance to solo over ‘wham-bam-thank you ma’am’ kind of tunes. A slower piece with some nicely written passages for the drummer to interpret as a soloist rather than an accompanist can make a welcome change for everybody and freshen things up.

There are many more possibilities for using the drums, (or any instrument), as a solo instrument - like so much, it’s just a matter of having a think about the various possibilities available to us instead of always going for the default position. As we know, jazz has a fantastic tradition of drum soloists, and this continues to the present day - there are so many great drummers out there. So let’s try and take advantage of that by using our imagination on how best to incorporate solo drums into our music as an organic constituent rather than always as a flag-waving rabble rouser. Let’s give the drummer some

To finish - here's a piece by John Zorn's Masada where the drum solo is not only incorporated into the piece but almost IS the piece! This is quite an old-fashioned 'drum feature' in a way, but still great nevertheless - especially since it features one of the great contemporary drum soloists - Joey Baron

No Culture

I was in the huge branch of FNAC in Sao Paulo recently, looking for some Brazilian music, and while I was browsing, some kind of anodyne generic pop music was playing over the sound system. It’s the kind of thing you hear all the time – female singer, the sound processed to the Nth degree, some kind of one-size-fits-all beat – and usually I pay little or no attention to it. But there was something about being in Brazil and listening to Brazilian music on the sound post devices they have in FNAC (that allows you to listen to CDs before buying), and juxtaposing that with the aural schlock on the sound system that made me think about this music.

And what I realised was – this is probably the first time in human history that a music has arisen that is derived from no national, or linguistic, or tribal or indigenous culture. It has no geographical centre – apart maybe from being vaguely positioned in the western world. It is something that can be heard anywhere in the world, yet represents no individual part of it. It is not American, though it has American influences, it is not British though though it is sung in English. It is some kind of featureless bland bromide that has its roots in no particular society, that speaks of, or for no particular people. Whose rhythm is not derived from or based on the rhythm of any language. It is a culture-less music – manufactured and spat out for the sole purpose of making money.

The songs do not speak of anything other than anodyne teenage love pangs, the voices are a bizarre electronic soup, compressed and manipulated to the point where they lose any semblence of being a real human voice. If someone sang in your livingroom and produced a sound as bizarre as the sounds that allegedly emanate from the throats of such singers as Madonna or Britney Spears it would be a truly scary experience. To hear that kind of robotic synthesis coming from a real human being would be just bizarre.

Yet it’s the norm in this music – this no tone, no passion, crocodile tears flat-line voice..........



If you go to India and hear the people there speak you can understand how the music links with the culture and the speech patterns of everyday life. The same goes for Brazilian music, Hip Hop, or jazz. The Beatles (possibly the first group whose music became truly global), are clearly British and represent a time and place. Go to Vienna and look at the 18th century buildings and the culture from which they arose and you can get a clearer understanding of classical music. Go to County Clare and listen to Irish Traditional Music in its natural environment and you will again see how music arose from and is aligned with linguistic, cultural and environmental factors – and history. The history, geography and culture of races and peoples are inextricably linked with, and represented by their music.

This other music on the other hand – this sticky treacly manufactured international pop goo, whose sticky effusions have polluted the entire planet, springs from no culture other than money. It represents only the international corporate business behemoth that has taken the name ‘music’ into its title, despite having no interest in the concept of what music really is.

It is unprecedented in human musical history – a music without any culture. A music without any message. And ultimately a music without any true humanity.

Boston or Berlin?

And so I gingerly set foot in the shark infested waters of the topic of American and European jazz. The title of this post, “Boston or Berlin?”, refers to a classic question asked of any Irish government of the last 30 years — do they lean more towards America, a traditional ally with deep historical ties to Ireland,  or to mainland Europe with which Ireland has been allied since entering the EU in 1974. This could equally be a question that’s asked of any young jazz musician in Europe -  do they identify more with American jazz, or do they take European models as their starting point? The same question probably couldn’t be asked of a young American jazz musician, since while young European jazz musicians are aware of what’s going on in the US, it’s rarely the case that their young American counterparts have any knowledge of jazz outside of the United States.

And why should they? After all, in the recent Jazz Journalist’s Awards only one European (Toots Thielemans for ‘Instruments Rare in Jazz’) made it into the winner’s enclosure, and only two, (add Evan Parker), even made it into the nominees list.

Of course the focus on American jazz by American jazz journalists is completely understandable – but I think it’s a shame that they are so insular. Not only are they missing out on a lot of great musicians and music, they’re also not really doing the right thing by their readers – which, if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, comprises largely of musicians. Yes, musicians who do the European touring circuit are more aware of the wide variety of jazz activity in Europe  - but for those who are not lucky enough to get on the European gravy train, and who ply their trade solely in the US? Well they’re certainly not going to learn about European jazz activity from the US jazz scribes.



I originally considered writing this post a while ago while reading the ’Can Jazz Be Saved?’ controversy in the US. Terry Teachout used NEA figures to posit that jazz was in danger of disappearing, which prompted a firestorm of reaction from all quarters in US jazz blogdom. What was interesting to me as a European jazz musician, as I sit on the edge of a Continent that supports a huge amount of jazz activity – festivals, recordings, big bands, tours, clubs etc. - was the implicit suggestion in this discussion that jazz exists only in the US, which of course isn’t true. I feel that a more accurate title for that controversy would have been ‘Can Jazz Be Saved in America?’. Because jazz in Europe, relative to the US at least, is in rude health. Of course the same recent economic travails have affected the music in Europe too, but there’s still a huge amount of activity, young audiences, and money (less then there was, but there nevertheless), to support jazz activity of all kinds.

And it’s not just European musicians who benefit from this activity, In fact it’s true to say that over the past thirty years at least, that for many American musicians, making a living in jazz has only been made possible by the vitality and economic clout of the European jazz scene. Jazz - at least as a viable way to make a living for many American musicians – was ‘saved’ decades ago by the European tax payer!  Even the biggest names depend on Europe for a large part of their work – just having a quick look at Brad Mehldau’s upcoming concerts for example: From the list of 65 listed on his website, 39 are in Europe. So Europe accounts over 60% of Brad’s upcoming concerts – a statistic that tells its own story.

So while I can understand the concern over the music’s travails in the land of its birth, to carry on a debate about the economic woes of jazz, and the possibility of its disappearance, without once mentioning the vitality of the European jazz scene, and its impact on keeping the music alive and economically viable seems a bit blinkered to say the least.

But American jazz journalists ARE a bit blinkered when it comes to this topic. I’m not in the slightest bit interested in the US vs European jazz wars bullshit, this is much more about the fact that serious jazz writers are not checking out some very good music and bringing it to the attention of their readers.




And what is a shame about this is that many people are missing out on learning about great music and great musicians. This is especially a pity for young American jazz musicians who have absolutely no idea of the existence of great players on their instruments. For example -  if you are young trombonist you HAVE to know about Nils Wogram, certainly one of the greatest players on the instrument today. If you’re a bassist and you like Scott Colley for example, you are definitely going to like Anders Jormin. If you’re a pianist who likes Brad Mehldau you are definitely going to find great things in Stefano Bollani and Enrico Pieranunzi, if you are a drummer and you like Ari Hoenig then check out Chander Sardjoe. If you like that whole M-Base scene then check out Stéphane Payen or Franck Vaillant. If you’re an improvising string player you’ll find killer and very original players in Europe like Dominique Pifarely, or the cellist Vincent Courtois. Is there a more original guitarist anywhere than Marc Ducret? What about Christy Doran? Nguyen Le? You like virtuosic legato lyrical playing? Try Julian Arguelles. And as for an unclassifiable original, how about Mederic Collignon? If you’re into composition, how about Django Bates? And there are many many more.

While all of these musicians are influenced to a greater or lesser degree by American musicians, they all bring a European sensibility to their playing and writing – a different approach that is definitely worth checking out, and worth listening to.



And there are great things going on between Americans and Europeans at the moment too. And not just the kind of ‘American star with local rhythm section’ thing that used to be the most common form of European/American interaction, but genuine artistic triumphs that represent the collective backgrounds of musicians from both sides of the ocean. For example Enrico Pieranunzi’s trio with Marc Johnson and Joey Baron, or Tim Berne’s ‘Big Satan’ with Marc Ducret and Tom Rainey and Carlos Bica’s ‘Azul’ with Frank Mobus and Jim Black. And I’ll even risk the charge of being self serving by mention MSG, the trio I’m in with Rudresh Mahanthappa and Chander Sardjoe. These are all examples of groups producing great music which reflect a combination of American and European approaches to contemporary improvisation.

There is a whole continent out there with a lot of gigs, festivals, musicians, ideas, tours and creativity going on. Europe provides a financial lifeline for many American musicians, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with their European colleagues (and also gives Europeans the chance to collaborate with their US colleagues too of course). European musicians themselves are producing vital original music all the time. And of course though I’m just mentioning European jazz here, because there are also great musicians in other non-American environments too – Brazil, Canada and Australia immediately spring to mind. Yet as far as the JJA Awards are concerned, and most American jazz writers, anything east (or North or South) of the US just doesn’t exist.

In terms of what’s really going on in the WORLD of jazz, it makes their writing and by extension their awards quite parochial. It’s like having a major American newspaper that doesn’t have a Foreign News desk.

Elitist? Moi!?

Recently I took part in a back and forth in an online discussion, on the Irish Times music blog, about jazz and its perception in the eyes of the public. And there was lots of the ‘people think of jazz musicians as being ‘elitist’ accusation. And of course there were lots of ‘we’re not elitist!’ rebuttals from various respondents. And this is a thing I’ve seen many times recently – a kind of desperation on the part of jazz musicians to not be seen as being any different to any others, to be accepted as being the same as any other musicians, to be seen as being the same as rock musicians, or country musicians (though different to classical musicians for some reason.....). And in a way I’d, in an intellectually lazy way, almost come to believe that myself. But if I’m being honest with myself, I have to say that deep down I don’t believe we’re the same as everybody else. I believe that as musicians, as people who are involved in the craft of music (as opposed to the art – that’s a different story....), we’re as good as anyone, and better than most. And we should stop apologising for it.

In fact we should, I believe, not be afraid to have pride in what we do and in the uniqueness of what we do.

I remember when I was in secondary school, in a religion class, the teacher stated the view that to be a true Catholic you had to believe that all other religions were wrong. I (being the worst Catholic since Genghis Khan), thought at the time that this was a shockingly intolerant opinion expressed by an old reactionary, but then when I thought about it I realised that he was right – if you’re a Catholic but believe that Buddhists (for example) might be equally right in their beliefs, then why would you be a Catholic? To put this into a musical context – for me, given the amount of work it takes to play the instrument well enough to play jazz, to know harmony well enough etc. - given all that, then if I believed that Indie-rock (for example) a music that is much less technically demanding, had the same value as jazz, then why would I go to the trouble of doing all that extra work on the instrument? If, in my heart of hearts, I really believed that Indie-rock was of equal value (to me) as playing jazz, then why wouldn’t I become an Indie-Rock musician and save myself all this technical practice? And the simple answer has to be that for me, being a jazz musician is more important than being an Indie-rock musician.

I’m tired of the apologetic stance taken by jazz musicians about their own music – why should we be so desperate to not be seen to believe that this music is somehow special? This music IS special! This tradition is special. It is unique, it has been peopled by some of the greatest musicians and artists of the 20th Century and it has produced some of the greatest works of musical art of the past 100 years. It has enhanced and enriched the lives of millions of people, it has influenced thousands of musicians, many of whom work outside the strict ambit of jazz. It prizes the musicians who work for the good of the group, while at the same time honouring individuality. To play it at its best demands, at the very least, great technical skill, an ability to listen to others while improvising your own part, sensitivity to your immediate musical environment, an ability to make split-second musical decisions, to hear everything you’re about to play just before you play it and then reproduce it on the instrument instantly.



Add to that an ability to read music, to know large amounts of jazz repertoire (melodies AND harmonic schemes), from memory, and an understanding of the major stylistic developments in music (all music, not just jazz) over the past century and you have a job description of the minimum requirements for a contemporary jazz musician aspiring to play the music on a high level.

When you see a jazz musician playing this music well, you are seeing someone who has submitted him or herself to years of discipline and practice in order to be able to play a music that is not only profoundly difficult to master, but is also generally financially unrewarding. You are also looking at someone who has at some point had the imagination and determination to set out on what they know will be a long and tough road, but a road they’re willing to travel in order to partake of one the world’s great musical traditions. They are prepared to undergo all of this work, all of this effort, for the sake of the music and in order to be able to play it with others.

Does that make them elitist?

Am I an elitist?

Frankly I’m past caring what people think – in general this ‘elitist’ accusation is born from a very lazy intellectual standpoint, usually made from the kind of person who would in no way submit themselves, in any music, to the kind of discipline and hard work necessary to be a jazz musician. If someday I’m accused of being an elitist by a musician who has spent over 20 years of technical practice and total immersion in their music and who plays it at the highest level, then maybe I’ll give the accusation some thought. Until then I couldn’t be arsed answering those accusations any more. I don’t have time for that kind of time-wasting distraction, I’m too busy working on the music.

Metronome Lesson

This is pretty amazing to watch.

When the metronomes cannot connect to each other, they get out of synch. As soon as they can connect, or 'hear' each other they get in synch pretty much immediately. It's like a lesson in microcosm showing how musicians will always play together if they listen to each other, but can't if they're in their own world. I've noticed this phenomena sometimes when working with classical musicians. They'll be great players and can read anything, but when playing a piece together they sometimes just read their own part and don't try to hear where they are in relation to the ground pulse and in relation to where everybody else is. As a result they get out of sync pretty easily. Not all the time of course, but it's a phenomenon I've noticed before - reading the part in isolation and not relating it to everyone else's part. In symphony orchestras of course this is endemic - but that's a whole other story!

Enjoy............

Non-Mobile Me

I don't have a mobile phone

This is the answer given to numerous people who ask me for my cell phone number, and it has been greeted with varying levels of disbelief, particularly in recent years. When I set my face against getting a mobile phone years ago, people would greet the news that I didn't have one with, at first, vague admiration, which then changed to a feeling that I was vaguely eccentric (especially as time passed and more people organised their lives around mobile phones), and finally ended up with people thinking I was barking mad.

My original objection to mobile phones was that I didn't want to be reached simply anywhere, that I didn't need the extra stress of being available at all hours of the day or night no matter where I was. But another reason for not getting a mobile phone became apparent to me a few years later after my original decision not to get one - the distancing effect of these devices.

This was brought home to me on a trip to Cairo in 2004, when I was there to do research in order to write a piece of music. On one occasion I was travelling round old Cairo with an Italian film crew, and we ended up in an old coffee house in an alleyway, with the sun setting and the moon rising above a minaret on the other side of the alley - a completely “Arabian Nights” scene. And I looked around to see if everyone else was getting this incredible vibe from where we were, only to find that all seven of my companions were on seven different mobile phones having seven different conversations, and being completely oblivious to where they were.

This kind of copper-fastened my intense dislike of these machines. And don't get me wrong, I'm not a technophobe. In fact I’m very computer literate, and internet literate, I have an iPod touch, a laptop, an iMac, I write music on my computer, I’m king of the e-mails, and write this blog. I'm very aware of what technology can do for us, and for me. I use Facebook and YouTube etc etc and I realise these are just part and parcel of being a professional musician these days.

But I've managed to hold out against the mobile phone. For the reasons mentioned above. Of course it's probably a pain in the ass for people to deal with me, since everybody is so used to being able to reach anybody at any time. And doubtless there are those who consider me to be a crank. And maybe I am. But I don't give a shit! I'm definitely happier without a mobile phone than I would be with one. I love the fact that when I leave the house nobody can reach me, that when I go for a walk nobody can call me or bother me with stuff that can, 99 times out of 100, wait. I love the fact that when I am out I never feel the need to “check my messages”, in that obsessive way that the vast majority of mobile phone users have. I never taken out a mobile phone at a restaurant and rudely put it on the table, the way so many people do. And I love the fact that I am 100% IN the environment that I find myself in at any time.

Because it is this partial removal from any situation that the mobile phone user submits to, that bothers me the most about this particular technology. These people are having a conversation with you and giving you their full attention only for as long as the phone stays silent or doesn't vibrate in their pocket or otherwise tell them that they need to disengage from whatever it is they’re doing and see who's trying to call. It's this tyranny of the phone that I really object to.



And this distancing effect is not confined to phone use either. I was in Valencia last week and I went to the amazing aquarium that they have there. It was a holiday that day and very packed, but I noticed that the vast majority of the people who were there spent most of the time photographing the fish and the tanks, and not looking at them at all. They were photographing and not seeing. Everything was about “the shot” - in previous times people would have gone through the aquarium gazing around them at the exhibits, talking to each other pointing out this and that. Here, they were walking from tank to tank, getting the shot, then moving onto the next one. They were there, but they were not there. More distancing.

Last night I played opposite Kurt Rosenwinkel at a festival here in Ireland, during Kurt’s set I went into the auditorium to check it out. And sitting in the audience, every few minutes, I would see someone take the phone out of the pocket or out of the bag turn it on, look at it, and put it back from where it came. Obsessively checking their messages - for what!? Almost certainly nothing important. How can you be at a concert, and not even be able to give your attention to the music that is being played right in front of you? A concert for which you have bought a ticket and paid good money to go and see. As always, the mobile phone has primacy. The users have become so addicted to “being connected” that they cannot even devote 45 minutes without meaninglessly checking their phones. More distancing.



With the development of this kind of technology we are more and more being removed from where we are, to the point where we cannot commit to being 100% involved in almost anything. Even the most fundamental things. I saw a family in a restaurant a couple of weeks ago - father, mother, two kids - the youngest of which, (a child of about 6), had been given his fathers iPad to play with at the table. So there they were, having a family meal with their six-year-old playing games on the iPad and wearing headphones. I looked at that and I thought, this is ultimately where it's going. A situation where four or five people, even family members, sit together but they pay absolutely no attention to each other, because they're all somewhere else.

This technology has all kinds of ramifications for musicians, not least the fostering of attention deficit in both listeners and musicians - especially young musicians who are growing up with this technology as part of their daily lives (this is a big subject on its own........). Can a young musician trying to learn to play jazz for example, resist the temptation to check his or her phone or computer while they're practising? It's a hard question to answer. All I can say is that if I'd had an iPhone, or a PowerBook connected to the World Wide Web in the corner of my practice room when I was 19, I definitely would have done a lot less practice than I did...............

Of course the genie is out of the bottle, there is no way of getting it back in, but that doesn't mean that we have to surrender to to it in every way - which is what most people seem to do. Of course I have no idea where this mobile phone technology and etiquette (or lack of it), is going to go, but for as long as possible, I’m going to keep going in the opposite direction.

Monk, Martial and Melody

In a recent blog post, Ethan Iverson has a good swipe at anyone (and there are many) who wilfully, or stupidly, misunderstand the work of Thelonious Monk. Ethan said in a post a while ago that should he and I meet we’d probably disagree on most things relating to jazz - an opinion I’ve never really understood quite frankly, because I find myself in agreement on most things that he writes about in jazz, and in particular when he writes about the historical jazz canon. And in this post in particular I think he’s right on the money, both in relation to Monk and his other sidebar criticism of Martial Solal.

I’ve always found Solal to be brilliant, but almost too brilliant. His fluid technique and febrile imagination seem to conspire to refuse to allow him to ever settle on a vibe or an idea for longer than a couple of seconds before he’s off again to demonstrate some other kind of pianistic or improvisational legerdemain. His playing is the musical equivalent of being on a Roller Coaster – full of thrills and adventure, but not something you’d want to do all day.........

Having said that, he IS a true original with a style that incorporates Tatum-esque flourishes but with a very different harmonic approach. His ability to leap from idea to idea is startling and there’s obviously a brilliant improvisational mind at work. He was one of the first really original European jazz musicians and his style was almost fully formed from a very early stage. Here’s an example of his quixotic brilliance in a trio performance of ‘Green Dolphin Street’ recorded in the 60s (couldn’t find any more of this footage on Youtube, which is a pity – looks like a fascinating show) - check out Johnny Griffin’s admiring comment at the end - ‘Ridiculous!’. Yes indeed, it IS ridiculous



But despite the brilliance, or maybe because of it, I often find myself tiring of Solal quite quickly, especially because of his inability, or disinterest perhaps, in sticking with one idea for any length of time, or with letting the music breathe at all.

Which is in stark contrast to Monk’s approach – a man who had an incredible ability to explore and/or repeat small amounts of material for long periods of time. It was Solal’s public dismissal of Monk’s pianism, at a recent talk in New York, that set Ethan off on his angry rebuttal of both Solal’s opinion that Monk couldn’t really play the piano, and of the people who thought Monk’s music lacked seriousness. He also took a swipe at the many people who over the years have believed that Monk’s music could be reduced to a stereotype by just adding a few clusters or sudden displacement of a note or two.

Which is something I’ve felt for years too, and in reading Robin Kelley’s biography (which I previously discussed at length here) it’s clear that this kind of dismissal of Monk as a kind clownish amateur pianist who, as was sometimes grudgingly admitted, wrote interesting tunes, was an opinion that dogged Monk for years when he was alive, (doubtless denying him many work opportunities), and incredibly, seems to be still around in some quarters.

I’ve never ever understood the idea that Monk was a ‘bad pianist’. Unless you maintain the narrow view (and some people do), that a virtuosic 19th century classical approach to the piano is the only barometer of pianistic worth, then surely it’s obvious that Monk was one of the most original pianists in the history of the instrument. How can his detractors on the pianistic front, not hear the SOUND he makes on the instrument? It’s totally unique and has never, to my ears, ever been reproduced by anybody. He is a virtuoso of sound and sonority. And he is a virtuoso of rhythm – he swings as much as anybody, but in his own unique way. His use of rhythm is both extraordinary and ceaselessly inventive

Here’s an example of both of those attributes – the unique sound, and the rhythmic virtuosity and of course the amazing swing



Ethan also mentions, and is critical, about the anecdote in the book that tells of Monk flying through some Chopin, and how this was used in the book (along with the proof of his knowledge of the European classical piano repertoire), as some kind of validation of Monk as a ‘real’ pianist. Ethan makes the point that Monk was often erroneously associated by critics with the European avant garde and this is another point I would agree with totally. Monk’s roots are irredeemably, both socially and musically, in the community from which he came. The section of Kelley’s book that deals with Monk’s childhood in the San Juan Hill area of New York was for me one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. It really clarifies where Monk was coming from – black evangelist church music, stride piano, Duke Ellington – and I think all of that is evident in the Caravan performance that I posted above.

There are a couple of related stories to the Chopin story mentioned in the book, that involve anecdotes concerning Monk playing privately like Tatum or like Bud Powell. I’ve heard these stories before and they’ve always irritated me because they are based on the premise that the way Tatum or Powell played the piano was the correct way to play, and that Monk could do it if he wanted to, but he chose not to. So in an effort to defend Monk, the purveyors of these stories are just reinforcing the stereotype that Monk’s way of playing the piano was wrong. I do not personally believe that Monk could, or would have wanted to, play the piano like Art Tatum, any more than I believe that Tatum could or would have wanted to play like Monk. Monk does not need to be validated in this way – his piano playing represents a unique achievement and he did not need to play like Tatum or Powell (or Chopin!) to demonstrate his bona-fides as a pianist


(Monk's Advice)

Another point touched on in Ethan’s piece is the rarity of good interpretations of Monk’s music. Again musicians often seem to believe that just adding the odd cluster to any phrase makes the music into an authentic interpretation of Monk. But this is such a shallow approach and misses the point completely – in fact misses many points. One of Monk’s strongest opinions revolved around how his music should be played and he apparently said ‘Never mind the so-called chord changes, play the melody!’. And as listed in the famous ‘Monk’s Advice’ page, (transcribed by Steve Lacy from various nuggets of info given to him by Monk) this ‘play the melody’ theme was a consistent one as far as Monk was concerned - ‘Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play’, and ‘stop playing those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!’

Melody was sacrosanct to Monk, as was rhythm, and yet so many people playing Monk approach the music as if the melody was something to be dispensed with as quickly as possible in order to get to the changes. It’s a very bebop approach and one that just doesn’t work for Monk’s music. All the character and individuality of his music gets flattened by the blunt instrument of changes running. I remember seeing the band ‘Sphere’ in 1983 – a band with great Monk credentials since both Charlie Rouse and Ben Riley had spent extended periods with Monk – and being very disappointed with the music, mainly because of the pianist in the band, Kenny Barron. Now Kenny Barron is a GREAT jazz pianist, but to my ears he played Monk as if the music was just another set of changes to be negotiated. Sphere were a great band, but in my opinion, not a great band for playing Monk.



One of my favourite recordings of Monk’s music comes from what might seem like an unlikely source – Chick Corea. He recorded what was originally a double LP on ECM – ‘Trio Music’ with the ‘Now He Sings Now He Sobs’ group with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes. One of the LPs consisted of free improvisations, which never convinced me at all. But the other LP was comprised completely of Monk’s compositions and this was great. Corea really gets inside Monk’s music in the sense that the melody is referred to constantly during the solos, and his rhythmic sense is so strong – his phrases are carved out of the melodies.

Corea manages to both reference Monk and yet remain unmistakably himself – the sound he gets from the instrument has that bright sparkling tone that always characterises his acoustic piano work, and here it’s put at the service of the music, using his rhythmic prowess to point up the shapes and angles of Monk’s melodies while generating some of his most swinging playing on record. Having the addition of Haynes, himself of course a former Monk sideman, really helps the music and his bubbling snappy drumming dovetails perfectly with Corea’s clear articulation. Vitous is perhaps not the ideal Monk bassist, with the huge reverb applied to the instrument (by ECM or by Vitous?) making the bass a bit swimmy at times, but as always he’s an impressive soloist and of course this trio has some serious jazz history of it own.

Here they are, more than a decade later, playing Rhythm-a-Ning, and again Corea and Haynes’ affinity with Monk is beautifully on display again. (I have NO idea why Vitous is wearing headphones!)



I recently watched an interview with Corea where he told of working opposite Monk many times in the 60s and described Monk as being ‘one of the greatest musical figures of our culture’. Maybe he needs to have a chat with Martial........

Monk - music and inimitable minimalism

Probably well behind everybody else, I’ve been reading the Thelonious Monk Biography by Robin Kelley And in what amounts to a private Monk festival, I’ve also been listening to the Complete Riverside Monk box set which I picked up in Paris recently.

I’ve been listening to Monk’s music for over thirty years now – I remember my father bringing home a double LP Riverside compilation when I was about 13 or so (pictured above – liner notes by Hall Overton!), and being really struck by the unique sound world of this music, which was unlike anything I’d heard in even my father’s extensive collection of jazz records. I didn’t understand it, but then again, not being a musician until I bought my first instrument at 18, I didn’t really understand anything............

Fast-forward several years and I not only played a lot of Monk’s music in various bands (as any jazz musician does in the course of playing this music), I also put together two different trios – one saxophone, one piano – devoted solely to his music, and also wrote the arrangements for a quartet tour where the entire repertoire was Monk’s. So his music has been part of my musical and everyday life for the majority of my time on the planet.

So, given all that, it’s taken me a while to get to Kelley’s book – I think I tried to order it when it came out first but it hadn’t been printed on this side of the water and then it became one of those ‘to do’ things. But it was worth the wait – I’m not finished it yet (as I write this), and I’ll be sad when I am, because it’s been a great read. As has been remarked previously by others, the amount of research Kelley did was phenomenal – the guy seems to have found out what Monk was doing on a week by week basis for about thirty years! And he not only undertakes amazing research, he also casts some light on on Monk’s (in)famous ‘eccentricity’, by showing that Monk was clearly bipolar and far from his eccentricity being something amusing, his condition caused tremendous difficulties both for him and for his family. The fact that his illness went undiagnosed for so long was caused both by a less developed understanding of the condition in those days, and the fact that the mental state of a black man was a very low priority for 1950s and 60s America.



The person that emerges in this book is a very admirable man – a genuine family man, generous to his friends and with his time to other musicians if they showed a genuine interest in what he was doing. He was also very musically demanding on his sidemen and colleagues, hurt and offended by the lack of recognition he often got, and by the reputation he had for being ‘crazy’. I knew that Monk had a difficult time in his early career, but until I read this book I hadn’t realised just HOW difficult it was. For the first 15 years of his professional life he struggled to get work of almost any kind – his reputation for being ‘weird’ both musically and personally, (not to mention a couple of minor drug busts with the consequent loss of his cabaret card), made it incredibly difficult, for a man with a wife and two young children, to support his family and develop his music.

Despite the appalling general lack of recognition he received around that time, there were several people who really swam against the tide and supported him professionally and who come out with great credit for it – Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff of Blue Note Records, Max and Lorraine Gordon (the latter going as far as carrying boxes of Monk’s records to record stores in an effort to get them to sell them), and George Wein. And his manager Harry Colomby emerges with a lot of credit for the work he put in trying to get work for someone who must have been both difficult to sell, and a very difficult client at times. In fact he was Colomby’s ONLY client for years – Colomby remained a schoolteacher throughout his association with Monk, and his role as a friend, manager, and agent for one of the world’s greatest composers and jazz musicians is a truly extraordinary story in itself.



As is the story of Nellie...... Without her, Monk wouldn’t have had a hope of surviving the early days in the way that he did, or dealing with the pressures associated with his fame from the late-50s onwards. Her devotion to him is both touching and extraordinary, and he was in turn devoted to, and totally dependant on her. Theirs is a unique story in the New York jazz world of that time – a stable relationship that was put under the most incredible pressure by economics and social class. How she managed to support Monk, raise a family, and deal with her own health issues over a fifteen year period, when almost no money was coming into the house almost beggars belief. But she did, and then when Monk received the recognition due to him at last, she metamorphosed into his road manager, talking care of literally everything for him while they we touring and working.

Of course the legendary Nica is heavily featured in the book too. Hers is a unique story – European nobility, wealthy but disowned by her family because of her bohemian ways, takes up with the NY jazz world and becomes an intimate friend and supporter to some of the most important figures in the music at that time, and to Monk in particular. The extraordinarily comfortable relationship there seems to have been between herself, Monk and Nellie is a story in itself. An unorthodox triumvirate that shouldn’t have worked, but did – for years.

While the book went over some ground I already knew from a previous biography of Monk by Leslie Gourse, I really learned a lot from this book about where Monk came from, the society from which he emerged and the whole jazz scene at that time.

I was again struck by just how much playing these guys did! The scene has changed so much and it’s very easy to forget the huge impact on everybody’s playing that must have been made by the sheer number of gigs they played. In a time when a jazz club gig was a minimum of three sets per night, 6 nights per week, and a possible couple of extra matinees thrown in, jazz musicians put in hours on their instruments in a way that’s almost impossible to do these days. Bands could stay together for long periods and develop their music in a way that to today’s jazz musician is really enviable.



And for those of us (which is nearly everyone by now) who only know that period from the recordings, it’s startling to see how much playing guys like Monk did with bands other than the ones we know from the recordings. For example there’s a mention of a gig at Town Hall with a bass and drum team of Scott LaFaro and Elvin Jones! I know I would pay a LOT of money to hear how that sounded – to hear how Elvin and Scotty sounded together, and how they sounded playing Monk’s music. Monk also hired LaFaro and Paul Motian for a week in a club in Boston! The legendary Evans’ bass and drum team, but playing with Monk – wow..... Apparently Monk was very taken with LaFaro and wanted him to join his band, but he’d already committed to Evans. In the book, Motian spoke very highly of the gig with Monk and tells a great anecdote about Monk asking him to sing his ride cymbal beat to him before the first gig and suggesting adjustments to it.

What also becomes clear by virtue of an accumulation of anecdotes, is just how dysfunctional many of the musicians were in the NY bebop jazz scene in the 40s and 50s in particular, but also into the 60s. The book is littered with stories of guys not showing up for gigs, being late, being drunk, being stoned, starting fights (physically sometimes), disappearing without explanation, dying young from diseases that would normally be rare in their age group, being psychotic, getting shot, knifed etc etc. Of course we all know these stories but when you read them in concentrated form like this, one after another, it really brings it home what the scene was like. It was (with some exceptions) a drug ravaged, alcoholic and dysfunctional community – severely discriminated against by society in general and by the organs of the State in particular. The story of Monk’s treatment at the hands of the police in Baltimore for example is both tragic and, even at this distance, enraging. Yet this underclass, operating in these appalling economic and societal conditions, managed to produce some of the greatest musicians and music of the 20th Century. Extraordinary.

A recurring theme in the last third of the book is the lack of new compositions created by Monk after about 1958. It’s interesting that he seemed much more prolific in the years when he was struggling to get gigs or be taken seriously as a player or composer. Once he became famous and began to get the recognition he’d always deserved the compositions dried up and his contract with Columbia seemed to be one long conflict between his contract, which demanded three albums a year, and his inability to come up with the material required. It was clear that the demand for new pieces stressed him considerably during this period, and Kelley puts down his inability to compose to exhaustion brought on by constant performing. But I’m not sure this is a strong enough reason for Monk’s compositional river running dry – when you look at Monk’s schedule, even at the height of his fame, he often had three weeks off here and a month there, and contemporaries like Coltrane for example, who was even busier than Monk, were producing new compositions all the time. It seems to me that Monk’s illness must have had something to do with his latter-day struggle and inability to come up with new material.




He was heavily criticised for playing the same repertoire over and over in the 60s, yet if you look at the videos on Youtube from this period, it’s hard to see why the critics are complaining, since his approach to these particular hoary old chestnuts is so fresh every time. Here was a guy who was really improvising every time he played. He never does any mere running through the changes, he’s always improvising off the melody. He does NOT play the same on Blue Monk as he does on Straight No Chaser – Monk doesn’t have a blues template, he really improvises every time he plays a tune – no matter how many times he’s played it in the past.

Another thing that struck me as I was listening to the Riverside Monk collection was how influential Monk was outside of the more obvious players usually discussed when Monk’s influence is mentioned (Jaki Byard, Andrew Hill, Herbie Nichols, Eric Dolphy etc). Listening to his solo piano recordings in particular, I came to realise that Monk was really the first minimalist in modern jazz. Yes, Basie had that aspect to him too, but it’s different. Basie swings tremendously while just using a few notes, and Monk does that too, but in Monk’s solo piano music there’s a stripped down quality and a deliberation about playing sometimes really tiny amounts of musical information that’s uniquely Monk. A kind of stillness and ability to listen to the sound the music is making rather than just listening to the notes being played. Monk will hang a chord or a cluster and just leave them there for a moment, savouring the effect, in a way that you hear in later music by people like Ran Blake (another Monk disciple) for example. And I can even hear it in the sometimes minimalist approach of Paul Bley, or Bill Frisell, or the pared-down drumming of present-day Paul Motian. In an era when jazz musicians moved towards ever greater levels of floridity and virtuosity, Monk sometimes espoused a Spartan approach to his material in a way that not only had never been done before but pointed to a whole aesthetic philosophy that would be adopted by future generations of players. He seemed to have an ability to listen to sound as an end in itself – a concern with timbre that was years ahead of his time. Only Ellington (a clear influence) can really be compared to Monk in this respect, and even then it was different.

Let’s finish by taking advantage of the still miraculous Youtube to watch Monk in Japan in 1963 playing ‘Ba-Lues-Bolivar-Ba-Lues-Are’. Check out the rhythmic vitality of the comping, and the way he takes the last phrase of the melody and uses it to comp for the first two choruses of the tenor solo. And also listen to the way he solos thematically all the time... And when you watch him play, you can see the great truth in what Kenny Werner wrote in Effortless Mastery where he said something like, “I don’t want to play like Monk, I want to feel like Monk felt when he played!’

Then there’s Rouse playing the music with such authority, and John Ore swinging the quarter note into bad health........And then there’s the amazingly musical Frankie Dunlop who as always, carves out a uniquely individual approach to the jazz drum solo. I LOVE Dunlop’s playing (I always preferred this quartet to the later one with Larry Gales and Ben Riley, good and all as it was), it’s such a shame he went off to a showbiz career (including apparently, stints as a female impersonator!) and left so little recorded work behind.

So, this is the Monk quartet of the early 60s – and the critics were complaining about THIS!?