I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this repertoire, this band, live and in the studio. It’s so original, as if he re-recorded it endlessly to fill the hole where other people doing things this good was. He did this many, many times, never feeling the need to reinvent himself. His Instagram story might have been the same thing copied and pasted every day, but copied by hand and pasted with brushes made from the manes of unicorns. Everything is nearly the same, things that felt improvised the first time you heard them crop up again from one performance after another, as if a sculptor is going back to their studio every morning chipping a bit off, smoothing an edge…but, as with the experience of lowering one’s good eye on to the ocular lens of a good microscope, the tiny variations become huge and significant events. But you have to look and listen hard. It’s as if the point of his music is to induce a high sense of awareness, steering your ears away from the freshness and the newness to the details beyond and behind the familiar.
In the petri dish today, I’m struck by the clipped, almost nagging sound the band gets here. As usual, there’s so much space for the bass and drums. Monk’s themes, solos and accompaniments melt into each other, yet stand like rocks in a Japanese garden, Charlie Rouse like a dragonfly buzzing between them without clipping his wings. There’s plenty of room, of course. Mid-“Epistrophy” I hear Monk play a single line theme that could have been another tune completely, and as I rush these words out before I forget it he does it again. Once you get in deep, these things start popping out all over the place. “Monk’s Dream” unfolds in a series of stopped sounds, the clarity of the band’s conversational interplay dry and uncompromising.
Frankie Dunlop’s drum feature jumps in and out of set song forms and tempos, a mini-set in itself. When an abrupt edit chops it out of its original flow and joins it, Frankenstein-like, on to “Criss Cross”, the lurch is artificial, illogical and hugely satisfying. On this song, John Ore’s bass has a primeval kind of sound to it, a proper tea chest thump that thuds with very little sustain. But somehow you feel the lines, in your body, in waves of up and down motion. The instrument sounds like something he made himself, and then made his own.
L-R Thelonious Monk, John Ore, Frankie Dunlop. Charlie Rous. Photo courtesy of Bozar Brussels
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