Thelonious Monk a life saver? Well, yes. And maybe you can hear why Friday.

Jazz guitarist Isaiah Kitts

The music of Thelonious Monk by the Isaiah Kitts Quintet. Bar Centro, 808 E. Center St. Milwaukee. 8-10-30 p.m. Friday July 28

 

Thelonious Monk saved my life. Well, yes, that’s a trick, since he died in 1982 and I’ll not overplay the Monk ghost hand, though it’s inevitable figuratively, in my case. And if I were young enough, a Monk ghost costume for Halloween would be grand and get plenty of sweet loot from boomer door greeters at least. Think of Monk’s “Friday the 13th” being a recorded loop in my costume. And it was Friday the 13th! Last Friday the 13th of January.

Fate was nipping at my nose mischievously, and knocking on the door of my chest, ominously. But, to reference another classic jazz title, this was “Fate in a Pleasant Mood,” by Sun Ra. So, I’ll give Mister Ra (or, as he aptly called himself, “Mystery”) a nod too for my survival, as well.

Now that I think of it, the only times I’ve wondered about ghosts enough to write about them was when a piano music box that I’d hadn’t played more than once, started playing on my dining room and looming right over the piano was Monk, in the visage of his unforgettable cover portrait on TIME magazine.

Here’s the photo and caption I write when I first reported on my mysterious little music box:  I took this photograph shortly after the small tin piano-shaped music box on top of the buffet shelf began playing its song, after several years of sitting silently. The music box formerly belonged to my deceased mother (who happens to be pictured beside the piano with my late father).

The music box started up inexplicably a couple of times and I was a bit spooked. I wondered if my impish late first wife Kathy Naab, who had died at age 47, was doing some metaphysical messing with me. I had also been in touch with her only sister at the time. Though Kris is a very rational scientist-type, she conceded such impish “ghost” behavior was the sort of thing Kathy, a parlor piano player herself, would do.

But I digress. I was on my way to the nightclub Blu in downtown Milwaukee to see trumpeter Jamie Breiwick’s Monk repertory band Dreamland, which had proved expert at the material. As it’s always a popular nightclub I was hurrying to get a decent seat, which meant jogging or at least walking extremely fast for about four blocks in wintry weather.

By the time I got to the front door of the Pfister Hotel, which Blu tops off on its 23rd floor, I suddenly felt a tightness in my chest that I had never really experienced before. It gave me pause for a second or two, and I made a very definite mental note, even though it wasn’t really painful. I also suspected it was my asthma, which acts up when I expert myself in cold weather.

Dreamland did Monk cock-eyed, rollicking justice as expected, though too often I was distracted by a chatty family at the same with I was sitting in. And sure enough, when they played Monk’s “Friday the 13th” to honor the very day itself, the tune lingered with its blend of affability and ominousness.
Bad luck day, or not? I didn’t give the chest tightness much thought but somehow during my next doctor’s checkup I recalled that and mentioned it to him. He was immediately interested and ordered a stress test. I thought I did well on the stress test but it turns out that I had an abnormal or irregular heartbeat.

So next came an MRI and as it turned out I had a main heart artery severely restricted by plaque buildup. This stunned me because I’ve never been particularly overweight but I would later learn one’s weight doesn’t preclude a person from falling victim to such circumstance. I was scheduled to have a stent surgically implanted, a procedure in which the interventionist worms a device all the way up an artery from your wrist to your heart, to place the stent which widens the constricted artery.

I was awake for the procedure and saw the artery – amid the other ones surrounding the heart – pulsing like an electrocuted spider, on a live television monitor and it was startling how much smaller it was than the others. This meant I was a candidate for thirty-six visits to cardio rehabilitation which I just recently completed, and it has done wonders for my health.

Thelonious Monk performs in London in 1970.

NPR

So, had I not gone downtown and rushed to hear the Monk Dreamland band, I might’ve carried on who knows how long unsuspecting of what was probably just going to get worse until possibly I actually had a heart attack. As it turned out I was very fortunate because the chest tightness did no damage to my actual heart. So, I can say that Monk (and Breiwick’s group) helped save my life.

All of which is to prelude notice of Monk’s music being played live again by the Isaiah Kitts Quartet this Friday evening at Bar Centro in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood. I can’t honestly get into how authentically or authoritative guitarist Kitts’ band handles Monk’s material. having never heard them. I even struggled to find much of anything online about Kitts, only to say they’ve been working on Monk, due to previous gigs. I can only speak with any measure of knowledge about the group’s saxophonist Jamill Shaw, who is one of the most promising young reed players Milwaukee jazz has had in too long. The band is rounded out by Josh Koch, Juan Camacho, and Connor Dugan.

Accordingly, any opportunity to hear Monk’s peculiar infectious and structurally subversive music should be seriously considered by anyone who enjoys catchy music and certainly any modern jazz fan. I’ll be there, intrigued and curious and, yes, grateful to Mr. Monk, so grateful I’m inclined to go back into time and share with you my obituary essay on Monk upon his death. I wrote this for The Milwaukee Journal (pre-merger) in 1982 and it was very well received then, so I figured it might stand the test of time to some degree. You can be the judge of that.

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Dreamland in Blu: Thelonious Monk Music Reimagined at Cloud Altitude

 

dream cloud

Dreamland’s cloud in Blu, 23-plus stories up.

This brief photo essay interprets the experience of hearing Dreamland, an imaginative and courageous ensemble which has worked hard in recent years to make much of the challenging Thelonious Monk repertoire alive for new listeners, and gratified old Monk fans.

Thelonious-Monk-UPI-Photo-Courtesy-of-the-heirs-of-W.-Eugene-Smith-and-the-Center-for-Creative-Photography-at-the-University-of-Arizona

The band Dreamland is named for an obscure Monk tune rediscovered by trumpeter/bandleader Jamie Breiwick. Monk often seemed to live in his own private dreamland. Photo by Eugene W. Smith, courtesy UPI. 

The band, conceived and led by trumpeter Jamie Breiwick, performed Friday night at Blu, the nightclub located on the 23rd floor of the Pfister Hotel,  with stunning views of the downtown Milwaukee lakefront.
I began taking a few photographs with no agenda. Gradually it seemed that the band’s ambition in reaching high to master and re-imagine Monk’s technically vexing yet uncannily charming and intriguing music — in such an atmospheric noir setting — was worth a visual treatment, or a dream sequence.

Such stimulating variables may be partly why they’re one of my favorite music groups. So, though a longtime arts and jazz writer, and because this concerns the architecture of Monk and of Milwaukee, I am in letting the dreamland images speak for themselves (for the most part), mindful of a famous Monk quote: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

dreamland dusk

Dreamland warms up the Blu night club audience shortly before dusk (L-R, pianist Mark Davis, bassist Clay Schaub, trumpeter Jamie Breiwick, drummer Devin Drobka).

dream 3

From Blu’s windows, you see the counterpoint of classic and modern Milwaukee architecture, looking south toward the Hoan Bridge. 

dream 4

At least one couple seems transported by Dreamland.

dream 5

The still-rising Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance tower is illuminated by many stories of its construction lights on the right tower portion. At, right, the blue flame atop the iconic Milwaukee Gaslight Building forecasts the weather.

dream 6

Blu is the rhythm of drums deep in the night.

dream 7

Dreamland begins heating up as darkness as falls on Milwaukee. 

dream 8

From Blu we see the end of the I-94 expressway in the foreground, curving into the southbound Hoan Bridge harbor overpass. Many years ago, when the I-94 ramp remained an unfinished precipice high over the ground level, it was used as “the expressway to nowhere” in the precariously climactic closing car chase scene in the film “The Blues Brothers.”

dream 9

Trumpeter Breiwick uses his hand over his bell to bend a mournful note on a Monk ballad.

dream 10 (2)

Even the carpeting in Blu has a dancing, dreamlike quality.

dream 11

Jamie Breiwick performing, and radiating, “Light Blue.”

dream 13

Just maybe, this is how Thelonious Monk – a genius of dancing, songful abstraction – might have viewed Milwaukee’s south shoreline along the Hoan Bridge.

P.S. Well, I’m fudging a bit on my promise to let the photos do all the heavy lifting, such as it is. But I’ll add a few more comments about Dreamland, whom I profiled previously here:

Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick “dreams” of Thelonious Monk’s music

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Now the band sounds like they are making Monk’s music their own. It’s in the increasing ease of articulation of the vital and sometimes profound ideas contained in often-hazardous chord changes and rhythmic trip wires.
Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick continues to pursue his Miles Davis-cum-Don Cherry influences, often pushing plummy accents into a slippery swing and, like a master baker, he consistently kneads the thematic material into whole, rounded melodic ideas. As the bandleader, he’s also imaginative and intrepid in delving into the mysterioso depths of the Monk book. Breiwick has an assurance and dedication to the material that I think would’ve made Monk proud, even though he was known as an often-exacting bandleader.

And for my ears, Devin Drobka is an ideal drummer for this music. As a Berklee-trained musician and vibist, he understands the implications of the harmonic changes better than most drummers, which helps keep the music bubbling and percolating with the right aroma and savor. And on some tunes, like “Light Blue,” his drum solo built directly from the harmonic and melodic charms of the melody itself.

Here’s the band stretching out on “Light Blue” from a previous live date:

 

On a longer previous solo, drummer Drobka dazzled in quirky wavelengths. I declare that Thelonious Monk himself would’ve danced around his piano (a not-infrequent Monk behavior) in response to Drobka’s solo — bristling, sashaying, hiccuping, all amid a push-pull tempo tension. Then he’ll fling out a few fractured march rhythms. But few fractured marchers can also dance, like Drobka’s Monk march can.

Pianist Mark Davis is a somewhat more supple and fluent phraser than Monk himself typically was. And yet Davis’ playing leaps and lopes at times, which brings to mind to the magisterially buoyant hard-bop pianist Sonny Clark doing a Monk take. And Davis rarely misses a chance to insert an acerbic Monk accent — often a buzzingly discordant second interval.

Bassist Clay Schaub is relatively new to the band, as a replacement for John Price. But he’s an extremely capable and musical player in negotiating the often-tricky changes.

I see Dreamland staking out their own high ground in the crowded strata of Monk interpretation. Their intelligence, fearlessness, youth and fire will keep this dreamland afloat, growing and prospering in ways yet to be imagined.

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All photos by Kevin Lynch, except as noted.