Big-Band Jazz, Personalized, Soloized and Energized

Big-Band Jazz, Personalized, Soloized and Energized

By BEN RATLIFF
Published: November 23, 2008

me of Thelonious Monk’s music is more than 60 years old, but it still has magic properties. It keeps small-group jazz honest: his compositions still contain relevant lessons about melody and harmony, rhythm and open space. Above it all they are songs: you can whistle them.

Richard Perry/The New York Times
The pianist Marcus Roberts on Friday night, part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s weekend-long tribute to Thelonious Monk.
But his music is also playful and rugged enough to withstand any revisionism. You can rough it up, break it down, broaden or narrow it. In jazz nobody else’s music sounds as equally right played by one monophonic instrument or filtered through a big band.

Jazz at Lincoln Center held a Thelonious Monk festival over the weekend, and its biggest event was a program of large-ensemble music at Rose Theater, with the 16-piece Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the pianist Marcus Roberts. In the past the organization and its house band have presented and played Monk’s music up and down. The orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis, has particularly personalized the notion of big-band Monk. Its concerts in the past 15 years have included some of the large-ensemble Monk orchestrations written by Monk and Hall Overton in 1959 and 1963, but also new commissions from its own members, magnifying small-group Monk tunes.

The concert on Friday — with irritating, recited biographical intrusions by the actor Courtney B. Vance — drew on the orchestra’s own arrangements. They came in all stripes. The trombonist Vincent Gardner’s take on “Light Blue” used Gil Evans timbres — piccolos, muted trumpets — as well as a dramatically slow tempo, a solo-piano chorus and a finale that sounded like an orchestration of an improvised solo. (That trick — orchestrating a notated improvisation — was true to Monk: you can hear it on “Little Rootie Tootie,” from the recording of Monk’s 10-piece band at Town Hall in 1959. A preconcert audiovisual lecture by the historian Sam Stephenson, on the documentation of the rehearsals for that concert, demonstrated how Monk and Overton came to the idea.)

Other arrangements stressed rhythm first. Both “Bye-Ya,” arranged by the bassist Carlos Henriquez, and “Criss Cross,” arranged by the drummer Ali Jackson, used a 17th member: the percussionist Marc Quiñones. Playing congas, Mr. Quiñones built clave rhythms in conjunction with Mr. Jackson’s timbales.

Mr. Marsalis loves playing with orchestral effects — he has a cinematic imagination — and his arrangement of “Evidence” showed it. Each of the theme’s strangely spaced notes came dressed in different colors, using the full range of the band, no single part of it for two consecutive notes. The approach suggested a living being, some big beast moving a toe, then an eyebrow, then a neck muscle, then a tail.

In two songs whose melodies come in sprays of notes, the arrangers played up that effect throughout. “Skippy” was arranged by Ted Nash, who played his own alto-saxophone solo, full of frenetic hummingbird motions; in “Four in One,” Mr. Marsalis got the melody’s rippling spirit into his trumpet solo, making hungry, tearing phrases.

Through these diverse variations Mr. Roberts was a constant, applying similar tactics to most of these pieces. He used specifics from Monk’s keyboard technique — dissonant chords artfully banged like early funk, sparky downward runs at the close of an eight-bar segment. But his solos contained his own focused energy, through repetition and sweet blues phrases. As he subtly toyed with the audience, building tension without raising his volume or speed, he repeatedly prompted cheers even before his solos had ended.