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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April showers Wisconsin with good music and wise words from Craig Taborn, Dave Stoler, and the Earth Poets and Musicians

Pianist-composer Craig Taborn. Courtesy Down Beat

Craig Taborn, solo piano, Café CODA, 1224 Williamson St., Madison, 7 p.m. Thursday, April 14. $30. For tickets:

https://cafecoda.club/2022/01/20/apr-14-2022-craig-taborn-piano-solo-bluestem-7-pm/

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Earth Poets and Musicians, The Coffee House, in Plymouth Church, 2717 E. Hampshire St., Milwaukee, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 16, in . Donations will benefit the Indian Prairie Project via the Milwaukee Audubon Society. Pre-registration is required due to ongoing COVID concerns. Register Here

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Dave Stoler Trio, Blu Nightclub, Pfister Hotel, April 22 (Earth Day). No Cover.

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If you are anywhere in southern or central Wisconsin right now, be alerted: pianist Craig Taborn,  will give a solo piano concert at Café CODA in Madison tonight, at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 14.

The Minnesota native has a load of contemporary and cutting-edge jazz performance and recording credits. After early influence from heavy metal and contemporary classical music, he discovered how such dynamics might reflect the profound cross currents of jazz when he assimilated pianist-composer Cecil Taylor’s brilliant 1985 orchestral album Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants). 

From there, Taborn proceeded to learn the jazz idiom, and eventually work with James Carter, Tim Berne, Roscoe Mitchell, Chris Potter, Dave Holland, John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis among others. In Madison, you’ll likely hear a generous sampling from his most recent ECM solo album’s Shadow Plays. These are mostly storytelling vignettes of certain concerns and concepts he values (“Bird Templars” or “Now in Hope”) or he thinks need highlighting (“Conspiracy of Things” or “A Code with Spells”).

For example, the album opener, “Bird Templars,” in a minimalist pulse, acts out the fluttering life-breath of a bird, with basso notes and tender, increasingly tensile interactive treble phrases that gradually suggest the growing symbiotic relationship between bird protectors and their aviary friends.

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The Earth Poets and Musicians (pictured at top) will perform their 35th annual Earth Day concert on Saturday, April 16. The event will also include ecologist Jim Uhrinak (lower left) and and poet/singer Margaret Noodin (lower right) who is an Indigenous studies professor at UWM and and Director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education.

Then on Saturday, the interdisciplinary Earth Poets and Musicians will present their 35th annual concert to celebrate Earth Day ( which actually isn’t until Friday, April 22) at Plymouth Church. It will feature Jahmes Finlayson, Holly Haebig, Suzanne Rosenblatt,  Harvey Taylor, ecologist Jim Uhrinak, and poet/singer Margaret Noodin who is an Indigenous studies professor a and Director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education. Here’s a Youtube of a TEDxUW-Milwaukee Noonan presentation:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddyFh1Rdho4&t=65s

This event will focus this year on the Indian Prairie Project, and reclaiming awareness and appreciation of the Indigenous Menominee Community. Donations will benefit the Indian Prairie Project via the Milwaukee Audubon Society. The event will be streamed at 7:30 p.m. and archived for later access. Check the website the week of the concert to see if the show will be live.

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Finally, if you’re planning (like me) on helping clean up your city’s natural spaces on Saturday, April 23 with Milwaukee Riverkeepers, you might fortify your body and spirit the night before (Earth Day evening) with a heaping helping of the Madison-based Dave Stoler Trio: protein-packed, hard-swinging, straight-ahead jazz, at Blu Lounge, at the top of the Pfister Hotel, 424 E. Wisconsin Ave., in Milwaukee, from 7 to 11 PM, Friday, April 22. (There’s no cover, so don’t forget the musicians’ tip jar).

Pianist Stoler’s straight-ahead bona fides (powered significantly by his long-time trio mates, bassist Chuck Ledvina and drummer Dave Bayles) don’t suggest his range and versatility. The Madison native assembled his own full jazz orchestra for a tribute concert of the music of the great composer and arranger Thad Jones a few years back for the Isthmus Jazz Festival.

He’s also the co-founder and keyboardist of the coolly ebullient 16-member Steely Dan tribute band Steely Dane, and has long held up the pianistic end of the Tony Castaneda Latin Jazz Sextet, and The Ben Ferris Octet and The Darren Sterud NOLA Tribute Band.

Among national and regional musicians in the know, he’s highly esteemed. Quiet as it’s kept, Stoler’s recording, Urban Legends is a classic of its kind, and remains available on cdbaby.com. and Spotify, and features drummer Billy Hart, bassist Ron McClure and tenor saxophonists Rick Margitza and Rich Perry, of the Maria Schneider Orchestra.

Stoler performs regularly with his trio and quartet at Smalls Jazz Club in New York City.

And if you miss this Friday date, the same trio will be performing at Blu on Saturday night at 7 p.m., under the guise of The Dave Bayles Trio, with a completely different repertoire. Actually, this might be the most seasoned working jazz piano trio in Wisconsin. Stoler, Bayles, and Ledvina served as the house band for about a decade in the night club atop the rotating Hyatt Regency Hotel in Milwaukee. So they may have unparalleled experience performing at high altitudes (for downtown Milwaukee). And answer me this: How often you can get “nosebleed” seats that are only a few feet away from the stage area?

Color your music Blu next weekend.

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