Fascinated by Monk
In 2017 I did a quartet gig with Rob Luft at the Oval Tavern in Croydon and we discovered a mutual fascination with Thelonious Monk tunes.
Pray, tell: Hammond organ from Scott Flanigan - who runs Belfast Friday spot Scott's - and super brushstrokery from ex-Gil Scott-Heron Jazz Jamaica icon, Rod Youngs with O'H and L.
We resolved to do a recording together (O’Higgins & Luft Play Monk & Trane - Ubuntu, 2019) with an overarching theme of Monk and Coltrane tunes & hoped to get a few gigs in the book.
The resultant tour was 50+ dates and in the course of that we played all 70-odd compositions by Monk. We put a lot of work into preparing all of this material, and so I have a fascination for this repertoire.
When we made our next O’Higgins & Luft CD (Pluto also on Ubuntu issued in 2022) we felt it was time to present a collection of mainly originals, which is what we did.
Billy ''the Greek'' Pod appears
In the meantime, I was playing frequently with Sebastiaan de Krom’s Trio who were resident on Sunday nights at the Troubadour in Earl's Court.
When Seb was unavailable he asked me to put a trio in, and so I asked Billy Pod and Luke Fowler to join me and suggested we theme the event by playing tunes by Monk (since Rob and I no longer played this repertoire).
Large book
This gave us a homogeneous concept comprising of a large book that I already knew well and a challenge to reinterpret for chordless drums-bass-sax line-up. Luke suggested calling the project Monkin’ Around and we decided to take it to the next level and had a trio session at mine (see 'Evidence' video, above).
Didn't want to put a lid on wider possibilities
When we started looking around for other venues, it seemed a little churlish to leave the cover on, say, the beautiful Steinway at the Pizza Express in Dean St, so we decided to record another session with Sean Fyfe on piano. While we were at it - giving us both an alternate quartet option and quintet option - we invited my long time buddy, Martin Shaw along on trumpet & flugelhorn.
Monkin' Around photo l-r: Luke Fowler, Billy Pod, Dave O'Higgins. Photo: Dave O'Higgins
So the album features:
Monkin’ Around Trio (sax, bass, drums)
Monkin’ Around Piano Quartet (sax, bass, drums, piano)
Monkin’ Around Trumpet Quartet (sax, bass, drums, trumpet)
Monkin’ Around Trumpet Quintet (sax, bass, drums, piano, trumpet)
“4 in 1” in fact…
... We vary our selection from the well known to the barely ever played Monk tunes and it’s a blast getting deeply into these unusual, distinctive, quirky and memorable themes.
We all do other gigs where we play original tunes, or standards, but this material has a whole new life-force all of its own.
It seems rooted in tradition and yet at the same time open to interpretation as it is so inherently characterful and motivic that it feels like a constantly refreshing well to draw on.
Aussie ace
So that’s the premise…. by the way in case you don’t already know them Fowler is from Perth in Australia. He plays bass like he really means it and cites Ray Brown as his biggest inspiration. He also ran the Jazz Junction pub and venue in Camberwell for a few years before the lease expired. Pod is from Greece. I met him shortly after lockdown when Toulouse Lautrec was putting on weekly jams and all the frustrated musicians were crawling out of the nothingness - hungry to play!
Tony Williams influenced swing
Billy’s hip, Tony Williams influenced dynamic swing knocked me out. The international reach is expanded further by burning Canadian pianist, Fyfe.
An insight into our process
Videoed on a couple of iPhones while we recorded the CD labelled on YouTube as The Dave O’Higgins Monk Trio since Luke hadn’t come up with the Monkin’ Around name yet.
“Epistrophe” spawns the title
A lot of Monk’s tunes were originally medium swing, although there is a version of this with Milt Jackson where they play the 4/4 melody against this 6/4 riff, before defaulting to swing.
We decided to keep the 6/4 thing going, creating a cool African rhythmic duality. The drums later solo over an abbreviated version of this pattern, which functions like a “shout” chorus.
Phrygian modality
I have developed a way of soloing on this that morphs the chromatic harmonies into a sort of Phrygian modality.
It compounds the exoticism (if you combine the chord notes of Db7 and D7 you get a very useable 8 note Phrygian dominant scale with the addition of 1 chromatic note).
The title, by the way, comes from the word “epistrophe” which is, according to the dictionary, the repetition of a word at the end of successive clauses or sentences.
That very much explains the often repeated and twisted melodic fragment that is the main melodic motif.
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