“I’ve always related the tune ‘Ugly Beauty’ to America,” says Josh Lawrence, referring to a composition by Thelonious Monk. The title, he adds, “feels appropriate to me when talking about a lot of aspects of American culture. There’s always something just a little bit off about things.”
Lawrence, a Philly-based trumpeter and composer, offered this reflection in early July, a couple of weeks after he’d played “Ugly Beauty” in a sweat-soaked set at Fishtown’s Black Squirrel Club. Something about the intentional clutter of the space complemented his interpretation of Monk’s title: a hodgepodge of busted guitars, vintage sports jackets, dismantled machinery and mounted fish lining the bricks walls of a repurposed steam plant, with audience members seated in salvaged church pews: a peculiarly American blend of detritus, nostalgia and hipster chic.
“Ugly Beauty” indeed — but that was not the name under which Lawrence introduced the tune, or that he borrowed for the title of his latest Posi-Tone Records release. Instead, he chose to christen the album Still We Dream, after the alternate title that Carmen McRae used for her version of “Ugly Beauty” on the 1990 album Carmen Sings Monk.
Still We Dream is built around an unlikely composer duo: Monk and Frédéric Chopin. As Lawrence explained from the Black Squirrel stage, the idea behind that pairing came from the late pianist Barry Harris, whose famed workshops he frequented while a student at Juilliard.
“He would start by playing three notes that he’d build into a Bach Partita,” Lawrence recalls of Harris. “Then he’d start to mess with it, and it would become Bud Powell. He’d mess with it a little more and it would be Charlie Parker. He would play Chopin changes so that it would sound like Ellington. Barry was a huge influence on me as a player and as a teacher.”
Lawrence took divergent paths to arranging the work of the two musical giants. “As a composer, everything Monk does is perfect,” he says. “I think of him as an architect, as a constructivist, where every measure means something and everything has a place. I feel the opposite about Chopin, who I see as more of an improviser who wrote down his improvisations, so I take a lot more liberties.”
Exploring Chopin’s work led Lawrence back to Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet, the method book by Jean-Baptiste Arban known as “the trumpeter’s bible.” Included among its exercises is an excerpt from Chopin’s well-known funeral march, which Lawrence adapts with lush, Ellingtonian hues and a surprisingly upbeat melancholy — suggesting both a somber dirge and a celebratory wake. From Arban he also borrowed “Kradoudja,” with its Arabian tinge, the band weaving the melody with sultry elegance.
As one idea launches another, the themes of Still We Dream might seem as eclectic as the Black Squirrel’s décor. But as Lawrence discusses them, one through line suggests itself: continuum. The straight line bridging classical composers and jazz masters, all drawing upon the same pool of material in seemingly limitless variations; the timeworn exercise book that has tutored generations of students, a direct link between aspiring novices and past masters like Lee Morgan and Clifford Brown; the lessons handed down from teacher to student, who then passes them along to their own students.
Even Lawrence’s Black Squirrel performance, presented by the Painted Bride, proved an example. When I first met the trumpeter in 2012, he was a rising star on the scene, then on faculty at the University of the Arts. He had been chosen, along with bassist Jason Fraticelli and drummer Anwar Marshall, to compose new works for a 10-piece ensemble of local musicians to celebrate the 40th anniversary of jazz at the Bride, which led to two albums as co-leader of the Fresh Cut Orchestra.
So the concert was a homecoming of sorts for Lawrence, who moved back to Philly in 2023, after several years in New York and then northern Michigan, where he ran the jazz program at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. (He and his wife now split their time between the city and a house in the Poconos.) Since returning, he’s managed the jazz education programs for Ensemble Arts Philly, taking over a version of the Kimmel Center music program where he once worked for bassist Anthony Tidd.
While Still We Dream features the ace players who make up Posi-Tone’s house band (saxophonist Diego Rivera, pianist Art Hirahara, bassist Boris Kozlov, and drummer Rudy Royston), Lawrence’s quintet for the Black Squirrel show was made up of Philly friends, and the music was looser and more high-spirited as a result. The band featured saxophonist Willie Morris III, bassist Nimrod Speaks, drummer Mekhi Boone — and pianist Orrin Evans, who has long been a mentor and collaborator, making Lawrence a linchpin of his Captain Black Big Band as both a player and an arranger.
“As a trumpet player in the section,” Evans says, “Josh brings me a sense of comfortableness and contentment. When he’s there, I know the section is going to come in at the right place no matter which horn he’s playing. And as an arranger, he’s taken the time to get to know me, and his arrangements sound close to what I had in my head without having to tell him what to do. I just trust him.”
That kind of trust is in short supply in McRae’s “Still We Dream,” penned by lyricist Mike Ferro, in which she sings of a couple reduced to “going ‘round and ‘round… pretending that this time it’s real.” The more time Lawrence spent with the song, though, the more complexity he found, deepening its meaning beyond a simple tale of lost love. “I started to think of it as a singer talking about her relationship with the audience,” he explains. “The stage in a club can be a place where we all come together collectively to dream.”
Josh Lawrence’s Still We Dream will be released on Posi-Tone Records on Aug. 15; preorder here.
