Jazz
On 10 October, the day Thelonious Monk would have turned 109, guitarist Miles Okazaki opens a dedicated website with a permanent streaming link to “The Monkathon”, free of charge: five hours of film in which he plays every composition Monk ever wrote.
It was shot on 16 and 18 October 2024 at The Jazz Gallery in Manhattan, four sets a night and sixty-six songs, with Frank Heath directing. Okazaki is alone, with no notation, just a setlist on the floor, and not a word is spoken in the whole film. Filming it was the idea of producer David Breskin, after seeing him play a solo set of Monk tunes in San Francisco.
“That meant I’d have to get everything memorized,” he says. “If I’m reading, I’m not really playing it. If you’re improvising on something and looking at something at the same time, it’s weird; it’s like you’re leaning on a crutch. Also, I don’t like how it looks onstage: the audience is looking at you and you’re looking at the paper.”
The guitar is a 1940 Gibson ES-150, the first commercially produced electric model, so called because the instrument plus amp, case and cable retailed for $150. Charlie Christian, Monk’s friend and collaborator, made it famous. “It’s not an easy guitar to play, but I like the sound of it,” Okazaki says. “It has a big, fat V-shaped neck that’s hard to get your fingers around, and high action on the strings. But I like the feeling of wrestling with it.”
At the same time, Cygnus Recordings is reissuing all six volumes of “Work”, the out-of-print set in which Okazaki recorded Monk’s entire output on solo guitar in 2018. “Work” has seventy songs: he left four of them out of the filmed concert.
His own most recent album is “Boomtown”, released on 26 June by Pi Recordings, twelve tracks with a ten-piece band.
Text by Aina Torrents