Monk business

Pianist Jason Moran is fed up with accessibility. “I have a thing now,” Moran explains, “where I don’t want my work to be e-mailable. I don’t want you to be able to e-mail this show to someone,”he says of the new multimedia opus he brings to Symphony Center—one of only five venues in the country that will showcase it—this weekend. “I want you to have to sit down and experience it.”

In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959—the project’s full title—was commissioned by Jazz at Symphony Center and four other major jazz institutions to mark what would have been Monk’s 90th birthday. It’s also far from the typical tribute show. Merely re-creating The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall album (reissued this year on Concord) would have been an ambitious task by itself: It was the first time Monk’s tricky, idiosyncratic tunes were played in the “legit” large-band setting; Monk tosses off several of his usual virtuosic asides; and the brass and woodwind unionon “Little Rootie Tootie” is a breathtaking mimeograph of one of Monk’s brilliant, zigzag piano solos. But Moran wanted to go deeper. “The original idea of just me playing the Town Hall concert didn’t really reveal how I felt about Monk emotionally or what I owed to him as a musician,” Moran says. “I wanted to put Monk’s music in context with his own history—as an African-American, as a bebop musician and as a pianist.” Drawing on archival research Moran conducted on the gig and Monk’s family history in North Carolina (video clips will be projected overhead throughout, complemented by audio clips) In My Mindinstead aims to be a meditation on the meaning of Monk.

As a 13-year-old growing up in Houston, Moran had a chance encounter with Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight” that changed his impression of how much individuality was possible in jazz. “He’s the one who really altered my path,” Moran confirms. Now 31, signed to Blue Note, and living in Brooklyn, Moran has an ability to incorporate postmodern aesthetics—he has become proficient at improvising to the melody of speech on his MiniDisc—that has made him the toast of both the jazz and performance-art worlds. That was demonstrated on last year’s Artist in Residence, his excellent compilation of his music for performance-art pieces.

But the selection of Monk’s Town Hall gigto honor the musician has as much to do with the music captured that night in 1959 (it was only the third time a jazz composer had a full evening at Town Hall dedicated solely to his work) as the remarkable back story that has grown up around it. In the weeks preceding the 1959 show, Monk worked with arranger Hal Overton in a loft, while its owner, the eccentric W. Eugene Smith, had tape rolling in the background. Smith, a pioneering photojournalist for Life during World War II, was also a confidante of Monk’s and an obsessive audiophile. “He’s definitely a voyeur,” Moran says of the late Smith, who kept his entire New York loft rigged with microphones. “He would record people walking up the stairs, having conversations with police officers, and tons of musicians just coming in and rehearsing.” What’s more, Smith’s archives offer the strongest evidence yet against Monk’s quirky-savant reputation. “[The tapes] shatter the myth that Thelonious doesn’t talk or that he’s aspecific or that he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Moran says.

Beyond the obvious similarities—both are African-American men, jazz pianists and composers—Moran shares many qualities with the artist who changed his path. Like Monk, Moran has a rough-and-tumble piano style that seeks out hard angles and hard questions, but with a sense of humor. “I sometimes tell my students that I’ve made all [my] mistakes part of my style, so I can get away with them,” he says with a laugh. But crucially, both are also Southerners. During his research, Moran even visited the former estate of Archibald Monk, the slave owner of Thelonious’s great-grandparents. “As Southern piano players, I think there’s a certain addiction to rhythm,” Moran says. “And there’s also an attraction to the ‘crunch’ of the piano—where you make a sound that’s deeper than just notes. It’s like the crack of a whip or like a bunch of pine needles under your foot.”

Throughout researching In My Mind, of course, Moran has ended up becoming every bit the voyeur—and perhaps more—that Smith was. How would he feel if someone rummaged through his own archives? “It’s a scary thing to think about,” Moran admits. “But I record myself enough to know that, if in 2077 some piano player finds my tapes, I’m gonna be okay with that.”

Jason Moran and his ensemble play In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959 on Friday 16.