أحمد [Ahmed]: Play Monk Album Review

It starts straightforwardly enough. Pianist Pat Thomas performs the Thelonious Monk standard “Bye-Ya” with a delicate approach, as Joel Grip plays a standard shuffle on his upright bass. Drummer Antonin Gerbal joins in with a tumbao-esque rhythm faithful to the tune’s Latin characteristics, followed by Seymour Wright on alto saxophone. Their take is somewhat atypical, but hardly outlandish. Still, even in these fleeting moments, there’s a feeling that things could take a turn for the strange. Bits and pieces of something recognizably “jazz” are present in Wright’s playing, but he stops, stutters, and stammers his way through the tune, sounding like longtime Monk sideman Charlie Rouse filtered through a Burroughsian cut-up technique. As his tone grows more drawn-out and guttural, and Thomas’ lyrical touch gives way to percussive attack, the rhythm section ups the ante, picking up speed like a gathering tornado. Gradually and without warning, the group hits a fever pitch. Monk’s music contorts into an ecstatic dance, one more befitting of a ritual trance state than a night at the Five Spot. أحمد [Ahmed] have worked their magic once again.

Over the course of 10-plus years, the European jazz quartet has forged a collective sound driven by repetition, precision, angularity, and relentless, sweaty energy. Its members have their own respective histories and approaches as improvisers, but they operate as a unit. They never rehearse and rarely make space for any solos, yet they play in lockstep, with a seemingly intrinsic sense of each other’s every next move. Until now, they’ve exclusively performed compositions by Ahmed Abdul-Malik, a bassist who synthesized Middle Eastern and North African traditions into a bold and daring new form of jazz. But on their latest album, Play Monk, the group shifts their focus to Thelonious Monk, who is second only to Ellington as the most-recorded composer in the history of jazz (a particularly impressive feat considering Monk wrote only 50-some compositions, compared to Ellington’s thousand or so).

In taking on such an iconic figure—one whose compositions have been deconstructed and reconstructed in seemingly every possible direction—the group risks revealing the method to its madness. However, much like their namesake, [Ahmed] are not merely reinterpreting the music of the past. On Play Monk, Monk’s songbook presents a jumping-off point for further experimentation with the unknown, an approach both syncretic and forward-looking. Their take on “Friday the 13th” zeroes in on the serpentine nature of the melody, and Thomas’ repetition of the main theme is almost maddeningly hypnotic. Wright’s approach to the saxophone is often cubist in nature, reducing the music to isolated phrases and sounds and then battering them from every conceivable angle. In this performance he’s at his most surrealistic, with his saxophone providing a steady drip of plunky textures.

The centerpiece is their take on “Round Midnight,” a Monk standard so omnipresent it’s practically synonymous with jazz itself. It opens with Wright soulfully wailing four notes of the tune, but the remaining 25 minutes take things so far out that it would be hardly recognizable if heard out of context. Their reimagining of the standard feels like the deepest inversion of the modal vamping Coltrane and his quartet pioneered on “My Favorite Things,” pushing so deep inward collectively that it feels as though the music is condensed into pure dark matter.