More Thelonious Monk from Phillip Greenlief

Dan Seamans, Phillip Greenlief, Tom Hassett, and Beth Schenck performing at Bird & Beckett (screen shot from the video of the concert)

During the first year of lockdown conditions, one of my favorite sites for streamed performances was provided by Bird & Beckett Books and Records, which had accumulated a major video archive of concerts that the shop had hosted. In July of 2020 I wrote about visiting that archive to listen to Monk, a survey of the music of Thelonious Monk played entirely on solo tenor saxophone by Phillip Greenlief over the course of about two hours. This was a two-set concert, and separate videos had been archived for the first set and the second set. That second set gave a solo account of the selections on the album MONKWORK, performed by The Lost Trio of Greenlief, Dan Seamans on bass, and Tom Hassett of drums.

Last night The Lost Trio came to Bird & Beckett for a live-streamed concert presented to a limited audience in the shop. The trio was joined by a special guest artist, Beth Schenck on alto saxophone. Once again, Monk’s music was featured on the program, coupled this time with the music of Ornette Coleman. Yesterday had been a busy day, so I only had the energy to make it through this first set. However, the video archive now has a single two-hour recording of the entire concert.

The first set accounted for extended takes on three Monk compositions that deserve more attention than they tend to get, “Boo Boo’s Birthday” (which was recorded only once at a Columbia session on December 21, 1967), “Ugly Beauty” (on the same Columbia album as “Boo Boo’s Birthday”), and “San Francisco Holiday” (first recorded by Riverside at the Blackhawk in San Francisco on April 28, 1960). Both Greenlief and Schenck were well-coupled in their solid command of Monk’s angular melodic lines. These were all pieces that emerged from Monk’s eccentricities at the keyboard involving mind-blowing unconventional intervals growing out of rhythmic patterns that ran the gamut from groping to staggering.

Each of the two saxophonists took a highly personalized account of coming to grips with Monk’s unconventional approaches to composition and performance. Both of them also created space for embellishing improvisations from both Seamans and Hassett; but, for the most part, the performance of each tune involved taking a melodic line as a point of departure for highly personalized interpretations. It is clear from his background that Greenlief takes performing Monk’s music very seriously, but his partnership with Schenck took his appreciation for Monk’s inventiveness to a new level. Their performances reminded the attentive listener of just how significant Monk was in the history of jazz and how fresh and relevant his eccentric innovations remain today.