Jazz Musicology?

I just finished reading Ivan Hewett's story about the Monk Liberation Band on the Telegraph Web site. Trying to figure out just who this group is and what they are planning to do was no easy matter; but, since the subject was arranging a concert of the complete works of Thelonious Monk, I could not resist applying the extra effort to resolve these questions. Since jazz is an art form of performance, rather than publication, the very concept of "complete works" is not particularly applicable. On the one hand it can be hard to draw the line between what constitutes an "original" and what is a highly innovative approach to a "standard;" and, on the other hand, even if a work becomes recognized as an "original," it may have more than one name attached to it (my favorite example being "Interlude," which is immediately recognized by most of today's jazz fans as "A Night in Tunisia"). Finally, as if these waters are not muddy enough, the very question of who the "composer" is rarely has a clear answer, since so much of the process of "making jazz" is highly collaborative. Therefore, I was not surprised to discover that Hewett and the Web site for the London Jazz Festival could not agree on the number of works that would be played in this concert. Hewett put it at 77, presumably on the basis of interviewing the performers; but the Festival site claims 70. This is not the only confusion over numbers. According to Hewett, the Monk Liberation Band is a quartet consisting of just "the right players" with a talent for playing Monk; but the Festival lists five musicians who will be joining the organizers Tony Kofi (saxophone, no indication of which size) and Jonathan Gee (piano). The one thing on which the two sources agree is that this project will take place over three concerts held on a single day. According to the Web site, the first concert begins at 4 PM; and the entire project will amount to "roughly six hours of music."

Having settled the facts to the best of my ability, I now feel I have at least some small right to rant a bit. The problem is that, when one has been "present at the creation," particularly where the immediacy of jazz performance is involved, it is hard not to be skeptical about these latter-day revivals. I was most aware of this when I attended a performance at the 2005 San Francisco Jazz Festival, which was a 40th anniversary celebration of John Coltrane's "Ascension." Now, in all fairness, since this was a studio work, only the "creators" were "present at the creation." The rest of us had to wait for the release of the Impulse vinyl; and for me this was a major life-changing experience. When CD technology finally emerged, I could not wait until it would be possible to hear this work without the interruption of flipping the disk to the other side (and I was even more delighted when the CD package, The Major Works of John Coltrane, included two takes of this work). The 2005 event was organized by the Rova Saxophone Quartet and featured a large and diverse ensemble, none of whose members seemed to have the foggiest notion of the spirit that had gone into the original recording project. If the recording captured a edge-of-your-seat feeling of what-happens-next (which few recordings can ever do), "Team Rova" could do little more than muddle around for about an hour inspiring little more than a sense of boredom.

This is not to say that I would dismiss the Monk Liberation Band on such grounds without hearing them. Were I in London on September 25 (rather than in San Francisco for my subscription performance of La Rondine), I would have no problem with forking out the £15 (a radical departure from the price of opera tickets in San Francisco even with the current weak status of the dollar) for the three-concert event. Nevertheless, six hours is a lot of Monk, compared to the duration of the sets I used to hear him play with his trio at the Village Vanguard; and, as many said when long-playing record collections of Art Tatum's piano solos began to get released, "a little goes a long way." This can be given a more positive spin by saying that Monk really requires "depth listening," rather than "breadth listening;" and, to stoke the flames a bit more, one can just as easily exercise that "depth listening" on his performances of Duke Ellington (as in his first recording session for Riverside) as on any those 70-to-77 "originals" around which the London concerts have been organized.

So I won't be in London, but it is hard for me to be discontented with what I have. I still have my memories of those nights at the Village Vanguard (when jazz was a far greater mystery to me than any of the "serious" music I was studying with such intensity at the time), I have an abundance of CDs of Monk (which may or may not cover all of the "source material" for the London concert), and I have a personal-use-only recording of the Straight, No Chaser documentary. These are supplemented by my memories of the tour of the 80th Anniversary Tribute that T. S. Monk arranged in 1997, which I heard in the Memorial Auditorium at Stanford University. All this is far more "alive" for me than any attempt to take an "encyclopedic" approach to Monk's compositions.