Jazz Reviews : A Redesigned Monk by Magruder’s Monktet

The setting was perfect. The Sculpture Garden of the Long Beach Museum of Art has to be one of the most pleasant places to hear jazz on a summer night. With the lights of the Queen Mary sparkling in the distance and the setting sun glowing through a rainbow of colors . . . who could ask for anything more?

Great. But how was the music, you say? Ah, well, Wednesday night it seemed to have possibilities. Composer John Magruder’s Monktet was on stage with a nine-piece band all primed to play new arrangements of the music of Thelonious Monk. Not a particularly new idea, but an interesting one, nonetheless. The opening piece, “Well, You Needn’t,” raised a few questions, however, the most obvious of which was, “What would Monk make of this?” Magruder had somehow managed to reduce all the disjunct accents and quirky rhythms to the smooth and well-rounded dimensions of what was once called “West Coast jazz.”

“52nd St. Theme” and “Ruby, My Dear” suffered similar fates. Magruder’s variations on these classic pieces were extremely well-crafted; the ensemble played them with nearly flawless technique. Yet the net results had little to do with the music of Monk because they failed to acknowledge the importance of melodic shaping in his lines, the significance of his very specific harmonic voicings, and the singular way in which he used a single accent or two to make a phrase come to life.

On a few of the pieces--notably “Bemsha Swing” and “Epistrophy”--Magruder was more successful, largely because he stayed with both the interiors as well as the exteriors of the Monk pieces. But the Monktet’s best outings came on a number of Magruder originals. Clearly, his own loose and easy lines provided the most appropriate vehicles for Magruder’s arranging style.

Of the soloists, only alto saxophonist Ron Singer and, to a somewhat lesser extent, pianist Alan Steinberger, seemed to clearly understand the special demands of the Monk pieces. Guitarist Mack Dougherty, working quietly in the background, constantly found ways to sneak in appropriately dissonant fragments of sound.