© -Steven
Cerra . Copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Audiences find Monty
Alexander’s music instantly accessible, exciting and exhilarating, and they
quickly warm to it and respond to it….”
-Mike Hennessey, Jazz writer/critic
“Monty plays – I mean plays – with Tatum’s grace, Peterson’s
richness, Garner’s force, Nat Cole’s wit. And over all, the very real trio
conception and brisk charts recall the tight structures of the early Ahmad
Jamal trio.”
- Fred Bouchard, Downbeat
“The striking qualities of
Alexander's playing are his intimate knowledge of the Jazz tradition, his
reverence for the pre-bebop piano legacy, his prodigious technical facility,
and his resilient connection to the cultural heritage of his native Jamaica
- Derk Richardson, columnist
“Monty continually creates
very logical melodic lines and yet the constant surfacing of his
improvisational surprises maintains interest no matter what musical context he
presents to his listeners.”
- Jerry Dean, Jazz radio host
Whenever I want to
experience what Duke Ellington so aptly described as “The Feeling of Jazz” at
its best, I play a recording by Monty Alexander.
What a “swinga”
this guy is.
Derek Jewel of The London Sunday Times once wrote: “His
work is in a sense, a history of Jazz piano … and yet, he distills all these
influences into his own style.”
Monty comes out of
everybody who has gone before him and I mean everybody: from Earl “Fatha” Hines
to Teddy Wilson to Nat King Cole to Oscar Peterson; the man is a walking
encyclopedia of Jazz piano.
In the insert
notes to Monty’s Concord Jazz album Full Steam Ahead [CJ-287], Gordon
Raddue wrote:
“Distinguished New
Yorker magazine jazz critic Whitney Balliett must have had someone like Monty
Alexander in mind when he wrote that the fundamental intent of jazz "is to
entertain and recharge the spirit with new beauties."
Indeed, the title
of the book from which the above quotation is taken, The Sound of Surprise,
serves as an apt description of what Jamaican-born pianist Alexander has been
producing ever since he crashed the big-time jazz scene in the late 1960s.
What sets him
apart from most of his keyboard colleagues is the enormous range of his musical
interests. He not only has paid his dues as a performer but, perhaps more
importantly, as a listener as well.
He brings the joy
of celebration to his work: a celebration of his life in music and the music of
his life. Delightful surprises abound in both the selection of his material and
the execution of same.”
Benny Green, the
esteemed Jazz writer and critic, offered these comments about Monty in his
liner notes to vibraphonist Milt Jackson’s Soul Fusion [Pablo S2310 804]:
“… Alexander is a
past master in the art of placing his accompanying chords, and knowing exactly
which rhythm to use in defining them.
Some of the
exchanges between he an Milt sound so tight as to be telepathic, so perfect is
the balance between them. [This is particularly true of the tunes played at
slower tempos].
The essence of a performance
at this tempo are the silences, and the shapes into which the played notes
mould those silences. Alexander is marvelous at this.
It is the sort of
thing that no orchestrator could ever achieve, and which classical musicians
have trouble comprehending.
It is an intuitive
art, born of an alliance between inclination and experience, and is one of
those aspects of Jazz which distinguish it from all other forms of making
music.
As a matter of
fact, Alexander, with whose playing I had not been acquainted before hearing
these tracks, is the sort of musician who makes the analyst’s job child-play.
The writer Ford
Madox Ford once described how, in his capacity as an editor, he received
through the post one day an unsolicited manuscript from an unknown writer
called D.H. Lawrence.
Glancing casually
at the story’s opening paragraph, Ford took note of this and that phrase, this
and that construction; then without bothering to read any further, he tossed
the manuscript on to the “Accepted” pile, remarking to his secretary as he did
so, “It’s a big one this time.”
Ford, with his
enormous experience of the art of literary improvisation, assessed real ability
instantaneously.
In the same way
the experienced listener of good Jazz will hear a few bars from any one of
Alexander’s piano solos, or even a few punctuations from his accompaniments,
and will do what Ford did with Lawrence
It does not take
long for a true Jazz artist to assert that artistry, and Alexander does this a
thousand times over in this album.” ….
Perhaps you’ll
come to the same conclusion as did Benny Green after listening to Monty’s
playing on the following video tribute and toss it in your “Accepted” file?
