His Own Drummer Marches Into Town

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by Paul Bass | Aug 18, 2006 10:36 am

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Posted to: Arts

Let’s get this straight before going any further. Yes, the “T” in “T.S. Monk” stands for Thelonious. But when the bandleader swings, literally, onto the jazz festival stage Saturday night, he’ll fill the Green with his own brand of “cross-talking” music, not his famous father’s distinctive bebop.

The 56 year-old drummer and his sextet take the stage at 6:30 to open the last installment of the free concert series. Blues guitarist Jonny Lang headlines at 8.

Monk continues a family tradition with New Haven roots. Although this is his first New Haven performance, he was just in town three weeks ago for a Monk family reunion; New Haven is filled with Monks. And Monk is labeled, for want of better terms, a “jazz” musician in the tradition of his pianist father Thelonious, whose quirky, mathematically unique compositions and performances made him one of the defining jazz musicians of the 20th century.

T.S. said he may play a bit of his dad’s music Saturday night. He used to play a lot of it. (Contrary to the concert publicity, he said he’s not doing a tribute to John Coltrane.) Mostly he’ll play sounds that would have never emerged from his father’s set list. Except in one important way: It’ll swing.

“We’re coming to New Haven to knock everybody down and swing everyone to death,” Monk promised. “Swing is what people like. Doesn’t matter if it’s jazz, hip hop, country gospel, or some ancient ritual rhythm from Polynesia. It’s gotta be swinging. It’s about people tapping their foot.”

Monk Beyond Monk

The road that leads Monk to New Haven’s jazz festival—a path to his own musical identity—began in 1998. He had just recorded a celebrated tribute to his dad called Monk on Monk. Ironically, doing so enabled T.S. to reach beyond his father’s shadow to R&B and other musical forms, to sing, to form a whole new sound, his own sound. His audience followed him.

“Up until 1998, every interview I ever did regardless of what I was doing was weighted about 75 percent on my dad and about 25 percent on me,” Monk said in an interview, which for the record was perhaps 50 percent in progress before his dad’s name came up. Well, maybe 30. “Monk on Monk exorcised on an intellectual level the 800- pound gorilla of my dad . I remember almost immediately as I started doing interviews on that record, there was an inversion. All of a sudden people said, ‘OK, he can actually deal with his father’s music. He has a right to be to be in the club. So let’s find out what he’s all about.’ The interviews went to being 75 percent on me and 25 percent on my dad.

“That’s important to fans of an icon. If a child gets involved, they want him to be able to hang in the arena, or they don’t want to see you at all. Once I established I could play my father’s music and play it pretty much with the best of them, there’s been no problem with identity. Then people said, ‘Let’s see what he’s all about. This is a guy who actually likes to talk, he likes to sing, he likes to play the straight ahead stuff.’”

More important than the interviews was the new sound. Monk called it “cross-talking,” which is what he named the album issued before his most recent one, his eighth recording.

From his description, the music also sounds like you could call it “jazz gumbo.” He picked up ingredients from the different musical phases of his life, stirred them together in a single kettle.

“Anyone in my demographic grew up with the echoes of the swing era in their ears as an infant. All of a sudden this modern jazz came along for a split second. Then Chuck Berry and the Big Bopper, we all grew with that as early teenagers. Then the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and the Byrds and the Stones and The Bee Gees, that was our teenaged years. Then the classic R&B came with Earth Wind and Fire and Janis Joplin and the Commodores. In the mid-‘70s all of a sudden this disco thing was in our ears. We said, ‘Will it never end?’ Then came hip-hop!

“Anyone in our demographic, they love John Coltrane—and they love Grover Washington. They’ve got an ear for Carmen McCrae, but they like what that young girl Alicia Keyes is doing now. Our ears are diverse. We grew up with the radio where you would hear Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme or Perry Como, and you’d hear the Isley Brothers. And you might hear Patti LaBelle. The radio was so diverse. When there was a hit parade in 1961, you didn’t have 18 songs that had the same beat per minute. You had a radio program that was based on the ebb and flow of a very diversified pace of the American public.”

Fronting On Drums

In one crucial way, T.S. Monk forged a path separate from his father’s from the day he began playing music, by taking up the drums, not the piano. His teacher was indeed a jazz giant—not his father, but Max Roach.

Leading a band as a drummer is far different from fronting on piano or sax or guitar, Monk observed: There’s no recognizable canon associated with your instrument. And you’ll drive away the audience if you indulge in extended solos.

“The wasteland of jazz,” Monk said, “is wrought with fabulous, fabulous Hall of Fame drummers who could not sustain a career as a bandleader, because they did not understand that people do not understand drum solos. People understand tight, they understand clarity, they understand swinging, they understand some very basic things that are the same regardless of your idiom.” So the drummer bandleader relies even more than others on singers or other soloists and stage patter.

What to expect Saturday night? “I’m gonna play a little Monk”—meaning his dad—“there’s no doubt about that. I’m gonna play a little funk. There’s no doubt about that. I’ll probably play some hot stuff from guys like Kenny Durham. Most of it is unplanned. You have to come prepared to do anything. If I get there, and there’s two-thirds of the crowd of octagenerians, then I need to do a swing thing all night. If there’s a lot of youngsters, I know I can be crazy and zany. I play for my audience. I might sing a tune.”

In between touring, Monk is recording a ninth album. The title: Thelonii. As in the plural of “Thelonious.” The title refers to four generations of such-named Monks: Himself, his grandfather, his son—and the man who made “Straight, No Chaser” so much more than a drink order.

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