By BEN RATLIFF - For the New York Times
Published: March 1, 2009
In 1959, at 41, Thelonious Monk had only recently located a broader audience. That February he gave a concert with a 10-piece orchestra at Town Hall: a risky, expensive way to secure an official beachhead in New York culture, a way to get beyond his reputation, such as it was, for small groups, jabbing dissonance and cultishness.
Last week’s concerts at Town Hall, on Thursday and Friday — an outgrowth of a Monk festival at Duke University in 2007 — demonstrated two different kinds of respect for the music recorded that night 50 years earlier.
In Thursday’s concert Charles Tolliver, the trumpeter and bandleader, recreated the original concert as closely as he could. (Sixteen years old then, he had been in the audience.) Following his own transcriptions of the live album’s music, he used the same instrumentation, the same order of songs, the same order of solos inside the songs.
The differences were in what couldn’t be replicated. The drummer, Gene Jackson, landed harder and more stiffly on his beats than the original one, Arthur Taylor: a generational thing. The solos were different, too, obviously, and here the tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland stood out. His style, especially on “Monk’s Mood,” annexed the broad sound and some of the mannerisms of saxophonists from that period. But the content was new in its harmony and narrative shape.
Published: March 1, 2009
In 1959, at 41, Thelonious Monk had only recently located a broader audience. That February he gave a concert with a 10-piece orchestra at Town Hall: a risky, expensive way to secure an official beachhead in New York culture, a way to get beyond his reputation, such as it was, for small groups, jabbing dissonance and cultishness.
Last week’s concerts at Town Hall, on Thursday and Friday — an outgrowth of a Monk festival at Duke University in 2007 — demonstrated two different kinds of respect for the music recorded that night 50 years earlier.
In Thursday’s concert Charles Tolliver, the trumpeter and bandleader, recreated the original concert as closely as he could. (Sixteen years old then, he had been in the audience.) Following his own transcriptions of the live album’s music, he used the same instrumentation, the same order of songs, the same order of solos inside the songs.
The differences were in what couldn’t be replicated. The drummer, Gene Jackson, landed harder and more stiffly on his beats than the original one, Arthur Taylor: a generational thing. The solos were different, too, obviously, and here the tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland stood out. His style, especially on “Monk’s Mood,” annexed the broad sound and some of the mannerisms of saxophonists from that period. But the content was new in its harmony and narrative shape.
