Thursday, October 11, 2012

Do it again

When a soloist steps forward, the threat machine in my head starts up. I may have a sense of anticipatory thrill, but it shares space in my body with my ever-present platform of dread. More than anything, I dread the repeater -- the solo that settles into what isn't a groove or an exploration, but a repetition of the one thing the soloist is thinking about. Three out of four blues solos get stuck in a repetition. It has something to do with the acceptance of showboating in the blues; when you're playing for the audience, I think, your mind is at work, not your soul.

There is a place for repetition. Jobim's one-note samba, Neil Young's one-note guitar wails, rising choruses in songs like Steven Stills' Love the One You're With. But mostly, repetition indicates a failure of imagination, which means a failure to let go and let something or someone else take charge of the instrument. Whether the performer calls it a muse, or God, or a fugue state, or inspiration, it's a release of thought and it's an ability to perform without effort.

Last night the aged bebop pianist Barry Harris told how his friend and roommate Thelonious Monk taught him his tune My Ideal by playing it all the way through, then having Harris play it all the way through, then Monk, then Harris. "I wish I had recorded it," Harris told the Herbst Theater audience. "We must have played it fifty times." He paused, in the presence of the divine. "It's too bad there's no recording of that day."

What to say about Monk? By stripping chords to their smallest necessary elements and then collapsing those elements into narrow intervals, Monk found a way to trap the silence of God within the gratitude of music. And once he had done that, it became playtime for him. He was a highly repetitive pianist, making tiny subtle changes, and sometimes big abrupt ones, while over and over finding the core, the place where nothingness could emerge, again and again. That's an important kind of repetition, one that rarely involves an audience.

Last night the young Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez showed the same kind of appreciation of silence and repetition. He had been asked to intentionally honor Monk in a three-generation piano show that SFJazz put on for its annual celebration of Monk's birthday. (Jacky Terrasson was the middle generation.) For his centerpiece improvisation, Rodriguez played a simple, tight and dissonant, figure in the middle of the keyboard, hinted at a stride bassline like Monk would, and then explored the central figure over and over. It was intense, sweet, and strong and sent shivers through me. Here's Rodriguez playing a Monk-inspired tune of his own called Cu-bop. It doesn't have the simple repetitive strain, but it's a powerful evocation of Monk:



When I was 15 I saw Monk. He was the warm-up act for Blood, Sweat and Tears at the old D.C. Coliseum, pretty much an airplane hangar. It's hard to know what I actually remember of Monk. I was there for BS&T; I played in a BS&T cover band at school, and presumably I carried a sense of privilege and tribute more than a desire to open my ears to something new. But I have an inkling, a tiny sense of memory, that Monk seemed a marvel, and that his pling-pling attack -- unlike anyone else's (except Chico Marx) in its childlike acceptance of the brightness of hammer on string -- got into me.

In 1978 living in New York City for the first time, I sat on my bed thumbing through the giant telephone book, and something stopped me on a page. I looked, and then I looked twice. There, listed in the phone book, was Thelonious Sphere Monk. He had two telephone numbers and a Harlem address. I guess he was actually living in Jersey at the time, but still, it was so cool to think that Monk had a listed number and that I could just pick up the phone and talk to him.

Here's a video of Monk with Dizzy the same year I saw him at the Coliseum:




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