Photo of Ornette Coleman: ©Burt Goldblatt/CTSIMAGES The Week in Jazz is your roundup of new…
The Week in Jazz is your roundup of new and noteworthy stories from the jazz…
The Week in Jazz is your roundup of new and noteworthy stories from the jazz…
The Week in Jazz is your roundup of new and noteworthy stories from the jazz…
On the eve of the of the 30th anniversary of San Jose Jazz’s annual Summer Fest…
You've also got this record coming out, SJZ Collective Reimagines Monk. But first off, do you remember the first time you personally became aware of Thelonious Monk? As a kid I was amazed to see the drummer play a solo in a jazz band and when I was in college, I played "Well You Needn't" for hours in my garage. I don't know if that was the first tune of his I knew, but that was the first tune I really explored musically as a student. I think what speaks to me about Monk's music is that it swings hard but also has that rhythmic syncopation that is his voice, countered with the fact that he also wrote some of the most beautiful melodies and ballads that jazz composers have ever done. So, he has that dichotomy of beauty and dissonance. Why did you guys decide to reimagine his works on this debut EP? When we started to come up with the idea that we'd let the Collective be its own identity, I realized we all have different stylistic tendencies as bandleaders and such, and I thought it would make sense to let all those personalities speak. The way to do that is through material familiar to the listener that each of the arrangers can put their own spin on. Since Monk is a favorite artist of mine, I thought it was a good place to start. Next year we'll do another artist and so on and so forth. How did you pick the tunes to include in the EP? I told everybody to pick one or two. This is an EP we're releasing so there are only four tunes on it. But the Collective is a sextet so through this process we probably had ten arrangements. Everybody did at least one, some did two. So when we perform, we play more of these arrangements. I also knew that in this process there might be duplication, so I would have to negotiate these territories when I got there. In fact, on the plane coming back from Taiwan, I was talking to a couple of band members, and they were saying, "Maybe there should be more organization in terms of who does what kind of tune." And I kind of pushed back on that because I thought for me it has to truly be about somebody's compositional voice and if I tell somebody to do a specific thing, then I'm already putting them in a box. What are the benefits of having so many varied voices within a collective? As I said, my trio is kind of a fusion thing and I'm old enough to have gone through cycles where you wouldn't even speak fusion out loud in the jazz context because it was just like a bad word. But to my way of thinking, the definition of the term fusion is to mix together different elements that you're influenced by. And if we look back over the history of jazz, that's really what's moved it forward in many decades, like Dizzy bringing in Cuban rhythms and Miles bringing in electronic instruments. So, in its purest form, jazz should be influenced by many different voices and to have that as the personnel in a band, I just think makes for a stronger jazz statement. How would you describe your arranging process or compositional voice? My personal musical journey has been not to deny any influences. When I sit down to compose or arrange, I don't think I'm going to do a specific style of song. I let the song take me where I need to go. In Taichung, Taiwan, they had a big festival with a nature theme; they wanted everybody to do a song about a flower or nature. We didn't have anything like that in our repertoire, but years ago, I played a gig with a gentleman named Dan Riley - probably in the late '80s. He's a bass player who, as a young man, got a call in San Francisco to play with Monk at the Black Hawk because their bass player was still in the hotel room for whatever reason. When Dan showed up, he told Monk, "Mr. Monk, I'm sorry, I don't think I know many of your tunes." And Monk told him, "Don't worry, we only play the blues and 'Honeysuckle Rose.'" So, I arranged "Honeysuckle Rose" for [the SJZ Collective] to play there. I sat down with a beboppy Fats Waller tune and it came out as a slow funk ballad in seven. I didn't have preconceptions leading me where I thought I needed to go. I just let the composition and arrangement process speak and that's what came out - and it turned out to be a nice arrangement. For the EP, you arranged Monk's "Green Chimneys." Yes, I love that tune. To be honest, the first time I heard it played wasn't via Monk. It was via Roy Haynes, who likes to open his shows with it. I just fell in love with, again, its rhythmic component. And I have ten CDs out now and if you go through those you'll find that almost every one of them is populated heavily by odd-metered music. It's one of my compositional tendencies. So, I just heard that melody in seven rather than the four which it was originally written in, and it was an easy step for me to clear the bassline to accommodate that in the opener. We've pretty much opened every show we've played with that tune, and it's a gas to play for me. What do you think makes Monk's music feel so relevant to this day? He was one of the great composers of the 20th century, not so much in quantity but definitely in quality. He had the groove, the rhythmic syncopation that kind of defined some of what bop was all about, and the beautiful lyrical sense of all the great ballads that he wrote. And it's a great lesson that can be learned for those uninitiated. Sometimes when they first listen to Monk, it's off-putting. Then there is a way to teach that person about to first feel the groove, and then feel the form of the song and what they're doing within it. And he's got good handles on his music for people to latch in onto. I think Monk's compositional voice appears in all those extra layers and sonic possibilities of today's music. And it's still strong. 
Feature photo credit: Trisha Leeper Like this article? Get more when you subscribe.