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Miles Okazaki on the wonders of Thelonious Monk's music, as played in full on acoustic guitar

photos dimicology.net
Dimitri Louis
photos dimicology.net

The music of Thelonious Monk has stood as both a perpetual challenge and a bedrock inspiration in modern jazz. For guitarist Miles Okazaki, it also represents a world unto itself, and a source of endless fascination.

In 2018, to commemorate Monk’s centennial, Okazaki recorded every single documented composition in his songbook — alone in his Brooklyn apartment, with a Gibson Charlie Christian archtop guitar, a Fender Twin amplifier, and no pedal effects. The resulting album, WORK (Complete, Volumes 1 - 6), was received with due acclaim. (At the time, I hailed it as “the six-string equivalent of a free solo climb up El Capitan.”)

He is now preparing something perhaps even more imposing: a full performance of Monk’s complete oeuvre, over four sets at The Jazz Gallery in New York on Oct. 16 and 18. The results will be documented with a concert film. And prior to that feat, Okazaki will play a 90-minute concert at Solar Myth in Philadelphia, fitting in as much material as he can.

Okazaki recently connected with WRTI from his apartment, talking about challenges of translation, fresh discoveries in the Monk canon, and how he has been preparing as if for a marathon. (He’s also literally preparing for a marathon.) Because we were talking on Bud Powell’s centennial, he also obliged with a full performance of “In Walked Bud.”


It's been a while since you first embarked on this project, which yielded the album WORK in Monk’s centennial year, 2018. So the main thing I wanted to ask was: how has it evolved as you’ve lived with it?

Yeah, 2018 was really just one iteration of a cycle that happens every five or six years. I go into some sort of Monk deep dive and revisit — just the same way you might do with a great book that you read again. Basically, it reveals to you what’s changed with you, because the book or the music is exactly the same as it was before. But you can perceive it differently. So that was a documented version of something that I had been working on for a long time. Then making that record, it was: “Let me get my mind around this body of work.” With any big project, once you get your mind around the scope of it, it becomes manageable to then break it into pieces and say, “OK, I’m going to do it this way.” So after that I did quite a bit of touring solo guitar, continuing to work with the repertoire. Inevitably that led to some favorites: not the whole 70 tunes or whatever, but maybe half of that was what I was drawing on.

That was the active repertory.

Yeah, what’s in rotation. Then I was like, “Well, I seem to be kind of neglecting these ones that I’m still a little scared of, because there were a lot of them that I could only just get together just to record. When you’re recording, and especially recording solo, you can take as much time as you want. You can do a hundred takes if you want.

Yeah.

And also, you only have to have that one thing in your mind at the time, so you can focus just on this one thing. My next goal was like: “Well, I’d like to be able to just randomly jump into any part of this body of work.” Spin the wheel, throw the dart at the dartboard, and just hit it at that spot. So I started revisiting some of these ones that I just recorded once and then didn't play anymore. Then at a certain point, I was playing a solo Monk concert at SFJAZZ and a gentleman there decided that he wanted to produce a concert film of this project.

You mentioned some of those neglected pieces. Can you give me a couple of examples?

I call this the “genius” chunk; I’m thinking of this set in terms of chunks. You know, Genius of Modern Music is sort of the first albums that were released on 78s, and then compiled into those Blue Note things. “Humph.” There’s this one called “Who Knows?” There’s one called “Hornin’ In.” “Skippy.” There’s one called “Sixteen.” These are all tunes that were only recorded on that record and not recorded again.

Izabella Okazaki

So you aren’t the only one who who recorded them and then set them aside.

I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that for a lot of people, their earlier work is a lot more verbose and trying to demonstrate things. There’s some element of that going on here. It’s pretty excessive, some of these tunes. Whereas some of the later things are really, really pared down to some almost Zen-like essentials.

Right.

These kind of tunes like “Jackie-ing,” or something like that. That chunk is a thing that I didn’t really play, you know.

John Rogers

Now how much of that difficulty is just in the material itself, intrinsically, and how much is in how difficult it is to play on the guitar?

Well, a lot of these took quite a few takes in the studio. But you’re talking about 1947, 1949, you know, 1951. They’re not so difficult for people nowadays. But there’s some stuff going on with the guitar where you have to somehow project the feeling of the song. You can’t really play all the parts at the same time. So you have to do a part of it — like if I’m playing the melody, this melody of “Skippy,” somehow underneath that, I have to keep this kind of rhythm underneath it while while playing the melody. You have to project that through somehow. There are different ways. I mean, if you listen to somebody like Steve Lacy, this is a real monophonic instrument when he plays something like that. He’ll just focus on the melody, and that can be enough.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s well-known that Monk would show people songs, not with the sheet music, but by ear. And even on sessions while the clock is ticking in the studio, you take way more time to just try to get people to learn it by ear. Then to just focus on the melody — like, not even show what the chord changes are, and just say, “Don’t worry about the chord changes; work on this melody, and then it’ll be fine.” There’s direct sources, direct evidence via Robin D.G. Kelley and folks, that says the melody was the thing, right? So it’s not the jazz pedagogy thing where you have all these chord changes. The melody can kind of carry the whole thing. So sometimes that’s the approach on guitar, or else it’s some sort of multitasking, kind of switching back and forth, because I just have one hand, you know. Like how you hear Joe Pass, where he’s kind of playing for a little bit. And this kind of back and forth.

I probably asked you this back in 2018. But one of the most fundamental decisions you made, first of all, was to to attempt this solo, instead of with a band. Then number two, you decided this would be an acoustic endeavor. 

Yeah.

You’re not plugging in and working with any kind of effect, or varying your sound except in a tactile way. Can you go back to your formative decision-making and and explain what led to these two decisions that defined the whole project?

Of course there were practical reasons, like if I want to really work on these tunes — to the point where something comes out for each tune that is beyond just executing the melody, and then playing a solo and executing the melody, or if I really want to develop it into some kind of what they call an arrangement, I need to spend some time doing that. I need to spend a couple days on a tune, and you can’t do that in the studio with a group. There’s no possible way. I wanted to be able to look at “Skippy,” or whatever is, and try to unlock that and then hit record. You know, I didn’t really write arrangements. There's nothing written down at all. But it’s just a playing thing, like you get into a certain zone and then do that. So that’s a practical matter. And then there’s a sort of a purity of of approach that I just aesthetically like. What can we just do with technique on the guitar? And what kind of extended techniques might it require to get the sounds I’m looking for without pedals and looping and layering and overdubbing and all that stuff?

Right.

Which I do like. I mean, I’ve done that on other projects. I’m certainly not a Luddite in that sense. But for me, when I hear Monk playing solo, it’s just Monk and the piano. So if I play solo, I’d like to just be with the guitar — try to see what I can get out of it, and use an old guitar, you know. The one up on the wall there is the one I used on the Monk record. But now I’m using this one, which is an even older guitar. This is from 1940.

Ah, wow.

It kind helps me historically enter some sort of mood, and it has a sound. This is a Charlie Christian guitar. And Charlie Christian, of course, interfaced with Monk. It may be just a little mental trick that I play on myself in order to get into the frame of mind, to be closer to the origin of the music.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You know, you mentioned some of your other projects: the last time I saw you was at Solar Myth with Trickster. You have a new album, Miniature America

That’s right.

…that is as far from this project as you can get, in terms of really incorporating the studio and lots of different collaborators, with a really sophisticated sound world. Having immersed yourself so deeply in this Monk universe, and the physical and mental and musical challenges that it presents, how did that then inform influence your music-making in seemingly unrelated areas?

Yeah — seemingly unrelated, I guess, sonically, because these things don’t sound the same right? But to me it’s all world-building. What initially attracted me and continues to attract me to Monk’s music is that it is a little world that you step into. It has all these little details. When you watch a great world-building science fiction film or something like that, it’s the details that get you. These things you only notice the fourth time you see the movie, and you’re like, “Oh, they really paid attention to that.” And those are the things that that make it. So to me, Monk’s corpus is like the model for building a world of sound, you know. There are many people like that, of course. But there’s something about this particular body of work where there’s sort of a limit to it — like, if you look at someone like Ellington, where does it start? And where does it end? This is a body of work that’s really consistent and self-contained. So that to me is an environment that you can go into and just kind of live there. The Holodeck. I don’t know why I’m going into the science fiction stuff.

When you enter that space, if you’re going to really get the most out of it, you need to really inhabit it. Which not everybody does. Some people kind of wander in and knock things over.

Yeah, or fall down a trapdoor or something. Sink into the quicksand. But how does it relate to other seemingly unrelated things — like for that previous record you just mentioned, the one that I just made, that’s a world-building project.

Yeah. 

And the goal of this isn’t to make you have any direct message or anything like that. It’s to create something that draws you into some kind of sound world and then keeps you there for a little while. It’s just a purely an attempt to make something that is consistent in its approach, something strange enough that it’ll make you curious, not so strange that it’ll send you away. Monk said: “Well, I just want people to dig it,” you know. That’s really the main thing. That’s how I’ve always felt about my music. And he also said: “But I want something that will keep the musicians coming to rehearsal.” You know? So you have to have enough meat on the bone there to have have people come back and want to work with you and be interested in doing it. So that balance, through the years, is something I’ve been working on. You know, as musicians, we’re interested in a lot of esoteric things and all that. But the music is for the people. The thing is to play, live, and to have the people dig it. Have it communicate something. I think that’s the spirit amongst music: It’s fun, but it’s serious.

Now, you have shared the set list for New York, which will be four sets of music. It’s been designed in a certain way. Can you talk through some of your design there? It’s different than the track sequence on Work.

Yeah, on Work it was like six sets. And they all ended with a blues. It’s not really practical to do six sets live. And at solar myth it’s a single 90-minute performance. I’ve been practicing, and they kind of flow a certain way. But they’re chronological, basically. So the record starts with that “genius” chunk. And then at the Bop Shop in Rochester, I picked up this Monk boxed set of 10-inch LPs. It has four of these LPs that were later compiled onto other things like Thelonious Monk with Sonny Rollins and stuff like that. But the original LPs are kind of cool because they’re consistent with the personnel and all that stuff. So I play the stuff from those. Then, Nica’s Tempo, the Gigi Gryce record, has three really interesting tracks on there that aren’t really on other stuff. And that’s the first set. It’s kind of early Monk. Then the second set is centered around Five Spot, because to me that’s the sort of apex moment, the 1958 August recordings, Misterioso and Thelonious in Action.

Right.

So that that second set is like Brilliant Corners, Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, Thelonious in Action, Misterioso. So it’s kind of a heavy-duty set, in terms of classics. Then the next set is the early ‘60s: you know, 5 x 5, Alone in San Francisco, At the Black Hawk, Monk’s Dream, Criss-Cross — the Columbia stuff, you know. Then the fourth set is mid-‘60s, into this record Underground. Then at the end I bring back stuff from the late ‘50s, because I wanted to end with certain tunes. “Blue Monk” and “Work” and “Nutty,” those are bread-and-butter tunes for me. And then Thelonious Himself, which was one of the first records that I heard, and it has this long version of “‘Round Midnight" on it — like a 20-minute version. I wanted to end with “‘Round Midnight,” and it seems logical, since the concert in New York will end around that time.

Yeah, the end of Set 4, it reminds me of ending strong in a marathon — last mile, it’s time to push.

It’s sort of like when you’re coming over the Willis Avenue bridge, coming down Fifth Avenue there. I’m training for the New York Marathon right now. So actually, it’s weirdly all analogous. My last long run will be right after the Monk concert, and then it’ll be this thing called the taper, where you kind of chill out for a minute.

So how will you organize this material for Solar Myth?

I was thinking I’ll just blast through them faster than normal, but that may be unproductive. Like going out in the Marathon too fast. You’re gonna cramp up at some point. So I’ll do a best-of type of deal, or maybe a chunk from each set.

John Rogers

Well, I’m glad that this project continues to live in your practice, and as a public-facing thing.

Yeah, me, too. It never ends; it just gets deeper. Really, it just does. As I get older, I’m like, “OK, I don’t need to know everything.” I can just kind of know certain things and keep working on them. Every time I come back… actually, I just sat down right before we were talking. I was just looking at one of the tunes, and “Oh! I never noticed that before.” It happens every time, you know.

Wow, what was the tune?

It was “Monk’s Mood,” and there was just one chord. It was this chord at the end of the bridge, and it’s a really minor detail, but there’s a G-flat in the chord that I never was playing before. I was playing an F instead. It’s a subtle difference. But it’s actually a lot different.

It changes the color.

Changes the color. I was listening to it, I was like, “Wait a second. Let me check that." I have this crazy book that I’ve been about a year working on. It’s all the my notes for the stuff I’m supposed to remember — like, 50 pages of of manuscript here. I don’t really need to refer to it. But the act of writing it down, you know, puts it into into the mind.

I love the idea that you’re still discovering things in these compositions.

I think it’s like, you know, if you go back and reread Moby Dick. It happens to me with movies and books, that you come back at a different time in your life, and you’re just like, “Oh, I understand that now. I get it.” You know, I didn’t understand Dostoevsky when I was 18. I mean, I read it, but I didn’t really get it.

You know, there are a few guitarists who play Monk tunes regularly. Steve Cardenas is famously a documenter of Monk’s music. 

Yeah.

Kurt Rosenwinkel and Peter Bernstein who play Monk’s music. What kind of feedback have you received from guitarists who have listened to your approach?

Well, Steve Cardenas was the one who originally sort of got me going on the thing. He’s a friend, and I’m a fan of his scholarship and the way he plays the tunes. So he’s a great person to bounce stuff off of. There are guitar players who I didn’t know, or didn’t have that much contact with, hero-level guitarists that I was curious about. I don’t go out and solicit feedback. But I was at some gathering in 2018, and Bill Frisell was there. His records with Paul Motian set the gold standard for playing Monk on guitar, in terms of faithfulness to the material, but still putting your personality into it. So we were just talking, and he told me: “I just wanted to say that I thought this was really an amazing project.” I was like, “Wow!” No offense, but that was better for me than any press. Just to feel connected to someone who’s really part of that lineage of interpreting Monk.

Right.

He probably doesn’t remember it or anything like that. It was just a passing thing, but for me it was very important. You know, you want to be faithful to the music, but it has room in it as a sound world. It has room for you to walk around and kind of explore and check it out. And that’s one of the things that keeps me coming back.


Miles Okazaki appears at Solar Myth on Friday, Oct. 11. He performs WORK: LIVE, the full Thelonious Monk songbook, at The Jazz Gallery on Oct. 16, and again on Oct. 18.

Nate Chinen has been writing about music for more than 25 years. He spent a dozen of them working as a critic for The New York Times, and helmed a long-running column for JazzTimes. As Editorial Director at WRTI, he oversees a range of classical and jazz coverage, and contributes regularly to NPR.