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Green Chimneys:The Music of Thelonious Monk by Andy Summers (1999)

A Random CD Review from The Stutzman Memorial Library

So, the computerized hopper provided the number 562 for today’s blog, which is:

Green Chimneys: The Music of Thelonious Monk by Andy Summers (1999)

All right, so everybody knows that Andy Summers was the guitar player for The Police, one of my all-time favorite bands. (Funny I never mentioned that before.) But did you ever wonder what he has been up to since his band broke up? After a couple of collaborations with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp immediately after The Police, I think he might have disappeared for a little bit, but he re-emerged with some more traditional jazz chops. (Interesting side-note, he was the bandleader for the very short-lived Dennis Miller show that, if memory serves correctly, was on around the same time in history as the Arsenio Hall show.)

So we come to this set of music originally composed by Thelonious Monk, arranged for a band led by electric guitar. Now, Andy Summers has a surprisingly distinctive guitar tone-kind of liquid and chorused-out and the thing I love about his playing is his harmonic sophistication, which would seem a perfect match for Monk, whose musical vocabulary was a little odd in its’ own right. The real trick that Summers exploits is his use of open strings in combination with traditional jazz chording. It’s an easily identifiable sound, like I said, but over the course of a whole album, things start to sound kind of same-ey. And sometimes, the music wanders close to the dreaded “smooth jazz” track, at least production-wise, which is a real no-no in my book, being largely a jazz traditionalist. (But that’s fodder for a much longer discussion and will only make me cranky.) However, I’m not so much of a traditionalist that I can’t handle a little fusion like this stuff. The two highlights for me are some jazz cello and the one guest vocal by Sting on “’Round Midnight,” which I’ve never heard performed vocally before.

Overall, this is kind of background music for the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble set, but when I make the effort to listen closely to Summers, I can appreciate how he kind of bridges the rock idiom, (with blues-based lines) with traditional or bop-inspired jazz. Nothing world-shattering here, but pleasant enough.

posted by Mike @ 3:14 PM