Jeremy Monteiro’s Trio Visits Kuala Lumpur

Jeremy Monteiro, Jay Anderson, and Lewis Nash in performance (courtesy of Mouthpiece Music)

Earlier this month I learned about the 45th jazz album to be released by Singaporean jazz pianist Jeremy Monteiro. As the advance material informed me, this was also “the 45th year of a career spanning concerts, education, and music administration.” That means that Monteiro was active when I was living in Singapore, between 1991 and 1995. While that was both a good time and a good place for those of us on the “cutting edge” of digital multimedia research, opportunities for listening to the performance of “serious” music were limited; and those for listening to jazz were downright slim. Indeed, the closest I ever came to jazz performance took place one evening, when my wife and I were walking along the bank of the Singapore River; and I heard the sound of a jazz pianist that made me stop and take notice, but not enough to check out the club where the music was being played!

The title of Monteiro’s new album is LIVE AT NO BLACK TIE, citing the name of a club in Kuala Lumpur (KL). Since I was in KL only once for a relatively brief business trip, I cannot comment of the jazz scene there; but I was not particularly surprised that the performance took place in Malaysia, rather than Singapore. The album was produced by Monteiro himself. It is only available for MP3 download, and the above-linked Amazon.com Web page does not include any booklet of background material in the download. The performance itself is by a trio with Jay Anderson on bass and Lewis Nash on drums.

Each of the album’s nine tracks provides ample time for improvisation. The shortest, Gerald Wilson’s “Josefina,” is about six and one-half minutes, while two tracks, Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” and “Monk in the Mountain” (composed by Monteiro and Eugene Pao) exceed twelve minutes in duration. Since “In Your Own Sweet Way” is given a trio performance, it is more reminiscent of the collection Turn Out The Stars: The Final Village Vanguard Recordings by pianist Bill Evans, leading a trio with Marc Johnson on bass and Joe LaBarbara on drums, than it is of the Brubeck recording. Indeed, the free rein for improvisation that Monteiro provides for both Anderson and Nash is impressive, meaning that the serious listener can appreciate the wide breadth of invention provided by the entire trio.

That said, I have no idea what thoughts, if any, Monteiro has about Evans; but listening to LIVE AT NO BLACK TIE revived my nostalgia for my Evans recordings, perhaps because my encounter with this new album took place a little more than a week after my writing about the recently-released Evans “career retrospective” album.