Music Review: Jimmy Owens - "The Monk Project"

This article was first published at Blogcritics.

Thelonious Monk is a good example of one of those musical geniuses who early on in their careers created a sound that was considered experimental and cutting edge but with the passage of time has become standard fare on the jazz menu. The innovative young pianist composer became the revered grand master, and after his death in 1982 nothing short of a legend. And nothing says legend like fellow musicians paying tribute to your music by making it their own. It's one thing when people copy what you've done; it's quite another to use what you've done as an inspiration to build upon and create.

 

Trumpeter Jimmy Owens' The Monk Project is just such a tribute. "Thelonious Monk," he says, "is one of the world's premier jazz artists and composers.  Many of his compositions provide (even the best) jazz artists with musical challenges, such as the opportunity to maneuver through difficult chord changes and execute unusual melodies.  I chose compositions that people may have heard before, however, when I arranged the pieces I wanted to give them a different feeling than how they have been performed in the past."  Owens has taken the music and transformed it into something new, yet something still quite recognizable.  But more importantly, something that might well have brought a smile to the face of the legend.  The Monk Project is jazz as it ought to be.

The trumpeter leads a septet consisting of Wycliffe Gordon on Trombone, Marcus Strickland on tenor sax and Howard Johnson on the tuba and baritone sax.  Kenny Barron is on the piano, Kenny Davis on bass and Winard Harper plays drums.  It is a group that combines veteran talent with new young voices—age and youth, a winning combination.  They feed off each other as though they have been playing together for years, and in some cases they have.

There are ten tracks on the album beginning with a swinging arrangement of "Bright Mississippi." "Well You Needn't" follows featuring Owens on the flugelhorn and the septet's rhythm section.  Owens and Barron have in fact played together for years and it shows.  A funky "Blue Monk" is a real show stopper with some down and dirty trombone from Gordon.   This is one of the highlights of an album filled with highlights. The group's take on "Stuffy Turkey" is treated more playfully, in contrast to the low down "Blue Monk."  Kenny Davis gets an opportunity to get out front on the bass. 

"Pannonica," one of Monk's most elegant melodies, is slowed down some in Owens' hands and achieves an almost more impressive eloquence.  They follow with an up tempo version of "Let's Cool One" with Strickland's sax featured in the opening solo.  "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" will have you bopping and nodding again with some low down improvisation.  Owens and the combo play around with rhythms on the complexities of "Brilliant Corners," and the album follows with a contemplative (what else would you expect) take on "Reflections."  A ten minute ride through "Epistrophy" which gives each of the seven a moment to shine ends the album with style. Scheduled for release in January of 2012, The Monk Project is an album to keep your ears open for.

Music Review: Eddie Daniels and Roger Kellaway - Live at the Library of Congress

Article first published as Music Review: Eddie Daniels and Roger Kellaway - Live at the Library of Congress on Blogcritics.

You might be forgiven for thinking that an evening featuring a clarinet and piano duo in a jazz recital might have a limited appeal. It is after all an instrumental combination you're not apt to come across very often. Indeed the clarinet itself has lost something of its cachet since the heydays of Benny Goodman, Woody Herman and Artie Shaw. Well, if you had been thinking that way about clarinetist Eddie Daniels and pianist Roger Kellaway's February 25^th concert recital at the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, you would have been wrong—wrong in a big way.

Daniels and Kellaway are two musicians who deserve to be much better known than they are, and the CD release of that February concert by IPO Recordings could do much to remedy that. This is not their first collaboration, they worked together on the critically acclaimed 2009 album, A Duet of One, an album Bilboard lauded as "a wondrous duet date featuring extraordinary musicians taking chances and thankfully succeeding on all levels." Live at the Library of Congress makes it clear that that previous album was no fluke. Two fine albums should mean something. These are albums where the dialogue between the clarinet and the piano is at times playful and quirky, at times lyrically mellow, at times technically brilliant, and always musically inventive. These men are virtuosos with their instruments and they know how to work together.

This was an exciting concert and it makes for an exciting album. The set list, nine pieces in all, is a mix of original compositions three by Kellaway, one by Daniels and works by a variety of other composers from Thelonius Monk to Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. They begin with an eight and a half minute romp through the Gershwin's "Strike up the Band," treating the familiar tune with a variety of inventive rhythms. They end with a Kellaway piece, "50 State Rambler," which alternates familiar sounding lines with edgy modernism. In between, there's an unlikely funky exploration of "America the Beautiful" and a lyrically expressive version of "Somewhere" from Westside Story. Kellaway's pieces show a similar kind of variety. There's the simple lyricism of "A Place That You Want to Call Home" and the dynamic energy of his "Capriccio Twilight." Monk's "Rhythm-a-ning" with a clarinet quotation or two makes for a moment of wit and some of the accompanying grunts might remind you of Lionel Hampton. "Etude of a Woman," Daniels' tune, is combined with Sondheim's "Pretty Woman." It has a haunting melody that seems strangely familiar.

The World Clarinet Alliance called the event a "landmark concert." In a Jazz CD Review of A Duet of One, Tony Augarde says: "Daniels and Kellaway fit together like hand-in-glove." Perhaps that is one way of making sense out of the album's cryptic paradoxical title, and if it was true then, it was equally true in February. The concert at the Library of Congress is nothing short of an eye opening revelation. You can take a clarinet and a piano, put them on a stage alone together and make wonderful music, you can that is if you've got Eddie Daniels playing that clarinet and Roger Kellaway playing that piano.