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Event Description
Marking the centenary of the Thelonious Monk’s birth, pianist and composer Jason Moran celebrates the legacy of the great American jazz artist. With large ensemble, film and archive recordings to delve deeply into the man himself using Monk’s famous 1959 Town Hall concert as the springboard, this is one of the jazz events of the year.
“… a stunning project — connecting with Monk beyond the surface of his music”
- The New York Times
Jason Moran developed this tribute concert to Monk. Though he came at it sideways. Starting from a 1959’s New York City's Town Hall concert which featured Thelonious Monk backed by a large ensemble he had rehearsed intently for the date. Then Jason kept digging. He found audio tapes and photographs from the rehearsals. "It's how to learn Monk from Monk," Moran says. He looked into Monk's personal history. And he assembled a new band to do much more than re-create the music from that evening: He wanted players to perform his original arrangements of those tunes, along with a video projection by David Dempewolf.
Thelonious Monk
Jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk (1917-82) was 30 before he made his recording debut as leader, had no working band until 10 years later and saw his career essentially over by 1972; his final decade was shrouded in silence and withdrawal. Eccentric and stubbornly individual, he was also initially derided as a player and called difficult and weird as a composer. Yet he survived it all to become a major figure in the music. As a performer and writer there is nobody like him, with ideas and a sound that have less to do with the European musical tradition than a desire to get to the African core from which jazz emerged. He was less schooled in that European tradition than his great contemporaries, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, yet he was a fertile source of ideas for them too, and, as the word spread, for other adventurous jazz musicians.
As a pianist, he gradually pared away his technique in favour of an angular, spare, percussive style with odd rhythmic displacements, unsettling harmonies and note choices as disorientating as missing a step in the dark. It was the expressive quality of sound, of timbre, he was after, even using his elbows on occasion to get what he wanted. Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, who worked with him in 1960, summed it up. “He can get more varied colours, sounds, rhythms and shapes out of the piano than anyone I know. He plays the whole instrument….He’s got fabulous technique.” And, it should be added, he was a superbly original melodist with a warm and engaging heart – and a sense of fun – behind the sometimes jagged surface of his compositions.
Acceptance, nevertheless, took time. Despite some masterful small group recordings in the 1940s he remained a controversial figure with some critics, and his career was not helped by the loss of his New York cabaret card in highly dubious circumstances in 1951. Barred from playing in clubs that sold alcohol, he survived on record dates and the support of his wife, Nellie. Until he regained his card in 1957, he resolutely continued his own, unique way as a player and composer – the two are inextricably linked – and was ready when his time came.
A series of albums, beginning in 1956 with “Brilliant Corners”, established him firmly in the forefront of jazz. A long engagement at New York’s Five Spot club in 1957 (from which John Coltrane emerged, energized by his time with Monk) further confirmed him as a leading force. His reputation as a composer, which had grown considerably among musicians during the late 1940s and 1950s, was crowned by the famous New York Town Hall concert in 1959, the first time his music was performed under his own direction by a big band, a 10-piece group featuring some of the best young players around.
Supervised by Monk, Hall Overton, a composer, pianist and teacher active in jazz and popular music, helped with the orchestrations. But it was Monk’s vision that mattered. Like his piano playing, his writing was instantly identifiable and like no other. The concert was, as producer Orrin Keepnews wrote, “an expansion that provides a much fuller presentation of Monk’s rhythmic and harmonic ideas than could be possible with the smaller groups he has previously worked with – but that still preserves the ‘pure’ Monk sound and feeling”. It amounts to a summation of his music, full of melody, beauty, warmth, high seriousness and fun, all expressed with the dissonant, quirky logic that is Monk’s alone – and totally jazz.
- Ray Comiskey
Presented by NCH
Room: Main Stage
Prices: €32.50, €27.50, €25
Location of event
Venue Information - The National Concert Hall
The National Concert Hall sits proudly on Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin’s city centre and is home to the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Choir Ireland, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Music Network and Music Generation. Next door to the picturesque Iveagh Gardens and in the heart of a commercial district known as the National Concert Hall Quarter, it hosts over 1000 events per annum. Its mission, to foster and celebrate the appreciation, knowledge, enjoyment and pure love of music as an integral part of Irish life.