{"id":5506,"date":"2015-01-22T17:03:54","date_gmt":"2015-01-22T17:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=5506"},"modified":"2015-01-22T17:06:12","modified_gmt":"2015-01-22T17:06:12","slug":"trumpeter-jamie-breiwick-dreams-of-thelonious-monks-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=5506","title":{"rendered":"Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick “dreams” of Thelonious Monk’s music"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Fb-Button\"\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>
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\"Jamie<\/p>\n

Trumpeter, bandleader and Monkophile Jamie Breiwick will lead Dreamland in a concert of Thelonious Monk music at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts at 8 PM Friday, January 23.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dreamland will perform at 8 p.m. January 23 in The Dawes Studio Theater of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, 19805 W. Capitol Dr., Brookfield.\u00a0<\/strong>For information and to purchase tickets, call\u00a0262-781-9520<\/a>\u00a0or visit Wilson-Center.com.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Was it all just a dream? Mystery still shrouds \u201cDreamland,\u201d but Racine trumpeter Jamie Breiwick is convinced it\u2019s a Thelonious Monk composition, though its provenance remains hazy. Monk is a closely-examined jazz composer, by musicians, writers and scholars. In his exhaustive 2009 biography\u00a0Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original,\u00a0<\/em>Robin DG Kelley calls the tune \u201ca bit of a mystery,\u201d as an \u201cold-fashioned ballad that sounds as though it could\u2019ve been written in the 1920s. Monk never copyrighted it, rarely performed it, and only recorded it once\u2026he never spoke about it or explained whether it was just an old song or his old composition.\u201d 1<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"theloniousmonk_composer\"<\/p>\n

Thelonious Monk, early in his career, when he composed many of his most fascinating and enduring compositions. Courtesy allaboutjazz.com<\/em><\/p>\n

Unsatisfied with the recording, Monk refused to release it. Monk\u2019s 1971 live solo piano version is listed as \u201cMeet Me Tonight in Dreamland,\u201d a 1904 song by Leo Friedman and Beth Slater Wilson, which doesn\u2019t resemble what Monk plays. \u201cPerhaps it is a sketch for a song he never quite finished,\u201d Kelley speculates. 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

The intrigue led to immersive investigation by Breiwick, one of the Milwaukee area\u2019s most intelligent, gifted and resourceful musicians. The trumpeter\u2019s Dreamland group — pianist Mark Davis, bassist John Price, and drummer Devin Drobka — plays mostly Monk, and hopes to make a live recording later, at Milwaukee’s intimate Jazz Estate.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized there is something deeper to Monk and I had to study him further,\u201d said Breiwick. \u00a0\u201cDreamland\u201d is uncharacteristic Monk. Not that the pianist — deemed a radical and atypical bebopper in his early years — was incapable of reaching into the past or romance. His most famous composition, \u201c\u2019Round Midnight,\u201d broods deeply in romantic loss. His playing draws on stride piano, an anachronism to boppers.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost any musician who has depth in their playing has investigated Monk,\u201d asserts Breiwick, also a talented educator. He teaches at Maple Dale School and UW-Milwaukee, and was a semi-finalist for the first-ever Grammy Music Educator Award in 2013. He also co-founded Milwaukee Jazz Vision, which advances and promotes jazz and creative music. Among, those directly fueling Breiwick\u2019s Monk obsession were drummer Drobka, who deftly executes Monk\u2019s hole-in-the staircase rhythms; former Milwaukee pianist Barry Velleman, and former Monk sideman Steve Lacy.<\/p>\n

Breiwick also gigs regularly at the Mason Street Grill with Mark Davis, who studied with pianist Barry Harris, who lived with Monk toward the end of the reclusive musician\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen, I found in the bowels of the Internet, 20 pages deep into Google, a discussion in which someone said they saw Paul Motian play it at The Village Vanguard,\u201d Breiwick relates. \u201cThe chart just said \u2018Dreamland.\u2019 Then it said \u2018Monk played this.\u2019\u201d Motian recorded \u201cDreamland\u201d with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano on the album\u00a0I Have the Room Above Her.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Motian<\/p>\n

Paul Motian recorded one of the few known covers of “Dreamland” on this album.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI was drawn to (Monk\u2019s music) because of how it made me play,\u201d Breiwick says. \u201cIt takes you out of your comfort zone in dealing with the harmonies. But the tunes are timeless and modern. I can\u2019t imagine what people thought about them back in the \u201840s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy understood them, by the 1950s. Breiwick also delved into\u00a0Steve Lacy: Conversations<\/em>, a book of interviews with the musician who — after learning, performing, and recording with Monk — dedicated much of his career to the man’s music, starting by making the first recording of it by anyone besides Monk, the album 1959\u00a0Reflections.<\/em><\/p>\n

A crucial recording for trumpeter Breiwick was Lacy’s 1962 album\u00a0Evidence<\/em>\u00a0with trumpeter Don Cherry and the marvelously musical drummer Billy Higgins.\u00a0Breiwick feels that Cherry had as good a grip on Monk’s slippery rhythmic and harmonic turns as any brass player. This is partly because Cherry, who came to fame with Ornette Coleman, is amongst the freest of jazz trumpeters, so he’s not hidebound by the fast, linear bop conventions that Monk’s sly, mad-scientist structures tend to undermine.<\/p>\n

Like Cherry, Breiwick’s thinking and improvising in Monk’s music works more off of motives — or melody fragments — rather than the chord changes, he says.<\/p>\n

But conceptually many of his cues come from Lacy, one of the most interesting and allusive thinkers in jazz, who often collaborated with poets and painters.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Lacy\"<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy made this recording with Monk, and became one of the most probing investigators and interpreters of the man’s sometimes mysterious music.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In a sense, a typical Monk composition seems dreamlike. It consistently takes odd, seemingly illogical turns, and often uses shadows of silence. Yet it invariably coheres, and sometimes haunts the listener, as a captivating — if strange and often humorous \u2013 tale of rhythmic, melodic and harmonic intrigue. \u00a0One tune is called “Misterioso.” Another, \u00a0\u201cEvidence,\u201d with more silence than notes, sounds like a zombie\u00a0skeleton, slowly gaining speed. Though reflective-sounding, \u201cDreamland\u201d obliquely fits the Monk scenario.<\/p>\n

When Breiwick refers to “any musician of depth,” I think he has foremost in his mind saxophonist Steve Lacy, whose incisive, spatial horn approach to Monk he is studying intensively.
\nLacy was a student of jazz, of the arts, of philosophy and most especially of Monk’s music. During a short stint with Monk in 1960 he became a functional acolyte, and used\u00a0a ring-bound notebook which he filled up with Monk’s wise, sometimes pragmatic and sometimes enigmatic utterances.
\nDeparted Pianist Barry Velleman, the best Monk interpreter I’ve ever heard among Milwaukee musicians, not only influenced Breiwick but gave him a copy of Lacy’s Monk gleanings, which are now widespread on the Internet. (see Lacy’s hand-written page below).<\/p>\n

Before even joining\u00a0Monk, Lacy recorded two challenging Monk pieces on his own album The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy.<\/em> He followed that with the all-Monk album Reflections: Steve Lacy plays Thelonious Monk<\/em> In 1958. That album includes Mal Waldron on piano, whose sensibility and mentality hewed as close to Monk’s flinty sort of rhythmic cubism as any of that generation of pianists. 3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Evidently,\u00a0Reflections<\/em>\u00a0impressed\u00a0Monk enough that he\u00a0hired Lacy, who had previously played with the extremely challenging and liberating avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. Taylor once took his entire band, including Lacy, to see Monk group perform, according to Monk biographer Kelley.<\/p>\n

By the time Lacy went in to the studio to record Reflections<\/em>, “he had learned about 30 monk tunes and listened to Monk records hundreds of times.'” 4\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lacy continued investigating, playing and knowing Monk’s music in so many ways, throughout his career including several striking recordings with a piano-less quartet with the great trombonist Roswell Rudd, notably School Days<\/em>, which Breiwick has discovered and examined.<\/p>\n

Lacy seemed to pursue a studied inference, suggesting that you can never fully master<\/em> the music, just get closer to it, to approach Monk’s almost Buddah-like presence as part of your body, hands and spirit.\u00a0Lacy also intensively studied the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, and the philosophic process of the Tao, which is “an active and holistic conception of Nature, rather than a static, atomistic one.” 5<\/strong>\u00a0The Tao or “The Way”\u00a0<\/span>is circular in its formal sense, best signified by the frequently reproduced symbol, called\u00a0Taijitu:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"tao\"<\/p>\n

As Lacy said to interviewer in April 1965:\u00a0“I’m a big one for words. I’ve read a lot, especially by and about artists. So I have a head full of notions, and that isn’t always good, you know. The instinctive silent life is beautiful too. It has advantages that the other doesn’t.”<\/p>\n

Interviewer :<\/strong>\u00a0Is this Monk’s life?<\/p>\n

It’s funny that you should say that, because I was thinking about Monk, although he’s more articulate to himself than most people realize. He doesn’t feel it’s necessary to verbalize, and he’s right. If you got him at the right time, you’d get a lot of meaningful words with a lot of silence around them. You’d have to leave the silence around them, or you would spoil the proportions.” 6<\/strong><\/p>\n

So Lacy understood that the pursuit it is both a formal study, and an intuitive one. Breiwick, who listens to a wide range of creative and popular music, seems to understand that balance as well.<\/p>\n

In fact, Lacy’s pan-cultural study, at one point, turned on Monk himself.
\nDuring a big-band rehearsal of Monk’s music, Lacy once informed him “that he was listening to ‘Eskimo music … the wildest African shit you’ve ever heard, Chinese music… even the music of porpoises.”
\nMonk then explained to the group, “They say if you can ever make a tape of a porpoise and played it back, down slow enough, it is the same as the human voice. They are so close to the human species. Because they had the same box here (pointing to his throat).”<\/p>\n

Monk then continued to expound about how porpoises have the rare sonar ability “to sense everything around them,” biographer Kelley writes. 7<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of Monk’s koan-like utterances was “always know,” a play on words which you can read as “all ways know.” That notion opens one’s mind up to new angles and, it would seem, all the spaces and silences between them.<\/p>\n

In his under-appreciated 1997 biography of Monk, Laurent de Wilde wrote:
\n“Monk is everywhere at the same time. His mastery of time is such that he seems to be emancipated from it. And the silence that he uses with such finesse is not really the suspension of time, as it is for that other master of understatement, Ahmad Jamal, nor the supreme and minimal form of elegance it is for Basie. On the contrary, it is a necessity which dazzles the ear. No, the silence is only a portion of his total music, all the more striking because it is unique. It is a creative tool, sort of audible and quantifiable phenomenon which is assigned a much rarer riskier enterprise: that of inventing<\/em> time.” 8\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is Monk’s saying “all ways know” merely the kernel of a bud of circular reasoning, or something else, that reason knows not of? Like the Tao? Or the sonar mind of porpoises?<\/p>\n

Or did he set out to reinvent time? Just maybe, Dreamland will reveal some answers.\u00a0Welcome to the waking dreams of Thelonious Monk and Jamie Breiwick.<\/p>\n

\"lacy<\/p>\n

Steve Lacy’s written notes documenting Monk’s advice, courtesy Jamie Breiwick and 1heckuvaguy.com<\/em><\/p>\n

\"jamie<\/p>\n

________<\/p>\n

Photos of trumpeter Jamie Breiwick (top and bottom)\u00a0by Bryan Mir, courtesy of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts.<\/span><\/p>\n

Image of The Tao or Taijitu<\/em> courtesy chriscorrigan.com.<\/p>\n

1<\/strong>\u00a0Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.<\/em> Free Press, 2009,\u00a0243<\/p>\n

2<\/strong>\u00a0Ibid. 515<\/p>\n

3. <\/strong>Lacy’s first Monk album,\u00a0<\/strong>Reflections,<\/em> is now available on a two-fer CD titled The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy<\/em>, coupled with Lacy’s third album as a leader, on Solar Records. Among other\u00a0Lacy recordings that investigated Monk are:\u00a0Evidence<\/em> with Don Cherry on Fantasy\/New Jazz; School Days<\/em>, with Roswell Rudd on Emanem;\u00a0Monk’s Dream,<\/em>\u00a0a \u00a02000 quartet recording with Rudd;\u00a0Only Monk<\/em> and More Monk,<\/em>\u00a0all on Soul Note; and\u00a0We See: Thelonious Monk Songbook<\/em> on HatOLOGY; and a live 1962 duet album I Remember Thelonious on <\/em>Nel Jazz, with Mal Waldron (who’s stuck with a bad piano).<\/p>\n

4. Kelley, 291<\/p>\n

5.http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tao<\/a>\u00a0In 2004, Lacy’s group recorded a two-CD “free jazz” interpretation of The Tao called The Way<\/em>, on HatOLOGY.<\/p>\n

6..Jason Weiss, ed., Steve Lacy: Conversations<\/em>, Duke University Press, 2006, 30<\/p>\n

7. Kelley, xvi<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0Laurent de Wilde, Monk,<\/em> translated by Jonathan Dickinson, Marlowe & Company, 1997, 212<\/p>\n

A shorter version of this article was published in Shepherd Express at<\/strong>\u00a0https:\/\/expressmilwaukee.com\/mobile\/articles\/articleView\/id:24755<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trumpeter, bandleader and Monkophile Jamie Breiwick will lead Dreamland in a concert of Thelonious Monk music at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts at 8 PM Friday, January 23. Dreamland will perform at 8 p.m. January 23 in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-1qO","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5506"}],"version-history":[{"count":65,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5729,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5506\/revisions\/5729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}