It’s Postmodern Monk, but so is Monk. Xhosa Cole Quartet’s third album and tribute to legendary composer and pianist Thelonious Monk, FreeMonk, freely reworks the legendary composer and pianist with giddy virtuosity. Even so, the album feels comparatively restrained compared to the wild party vibe the quartet and its special guests brought to Kings Place at the last blast of the 2024 London Jazz Festival.
At the start of the concert saxophonist and bandleader Xhosa Cole announced “We’re gonna be abstracting these melodies.” These are standards but the material is more freely deployed with the discipline of using Monk fragments to create a kind of musical sliding puzzle. The key thing about these proceedings that could decide them for you is this: you might see it as a brave bricolage of the best of that remarkable composer, or you might see it as a self-indulgent assemblage of quotations and riffs.
Perhaps perversely the album FreeMonk (released 25 January 2025) features no piano; the guitar of Steve Saunders, with Josh Vadiveloo on double bass and Nathan England Jones on drums, plus Heidi Vogel and a tap dancer. Its eight substantial tracks include Trinkle-Tinkle, Rhythm-a-ning, Mysterio mashed with Straight, No Chaser, Cross Cross and ‘Round Midnight.
The concert was wildly different sonically, and more expansive, more fun, more ribald and abundant. Generally more. As a listener you’ll get lost, then familiar motifs will recur from out of the maelstrom and the band will pivot briefly. It’s no mere covers exercise: it’s playful and interrogatory. It’s Monk, or Monkish, for sure, but it kind of became its own thing.
In the first set Tim Giles on drums and Josh Vadiveloo on bass were at the forefront, endlessly listenable and intimately involved in a quartet conversation, before stepping back in the second set: supportive, retaining their quality, but more invisibly. The second set brought on Byron Wallen on trumpet, Tom Challenger on tenor, and Hans Koller on euphonium. Koller once showed the young jazz student Cole his first Monk tune and set him a class assessment on Monk and Parker. The modernists have taken over the asylum…
The chop n’ screw / remix approach works so well because of the tunes’ memorableness and familiarity. Monk’s catalogue only extends to seventy numbers, some unrecorded. His striking and influential style in composing and improvising on the piano features characteristic use of whole tone scales, parallel sixths, and silence. Monk once said, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” Monk is individualistic and weird and sometimes when players play to the weirdness it fails, whereas when you try and play it straight you can let its own sweet freak flag fly by itself.
The trick is it’s not so much about just spiky angular modernism, Monk’s also lyrical, and so in this combination of impulses Xhosa is perfectly poised. Xhosa has at times such overflowing creativity that I remember him wondering out loud on a solo livestyream about a betraying maybe a lack of taste and overplaying. His abundance is one fitting way to approach the implications of monk’s work. You could do equally well go more skeletal, more monkish, but no-one does that.
The four of them on the horns was a ridiculous and joyous thing; Hans Koller particularly mischievous on the euphonium off to one side acting as Devils Advocate or Fool For A Day to Byron’s structural approach to the material, with Tom Challenger’s extrapolatory approach adding color and relief, and Xhosa holding it all together like a boss while Pat Thomas on piano gave the steer for much of the time. Pat Thomas is the perfect man for the piano here; I don’t actually recall hearing him play with anything like such a sense of structure before but there we were; it was loose and bold and very Pat Thomas to answer Monk’s idiosyncrasy with more idiosyncrasy.
Possibly in other hands it would be a case of the band having too much fun. There’s an overall impression of organised chaos but they stick closely to the famous melodic lines, but they play them at different times in different ways overlaid all over each other so the individual parts are comprehensible but all together becomes raucous, with sections in which they freely mash up different themes to each other as if to see if they are simpatico. It wasn’t until thirty minutes into the second set that I heard any “Round Midnight”, and not seven minutes after that until they all conspicuously played a theme together simultaneously in harmony and time.
By the end of the second set it was a free – and visibly carefree – blowing session, which nevertheless felt epochal in manifesting what everyone in the game aspires to, that perfect confidence in freedom within structure. All four horns simultaneously blasting the themes at the very end, almost gloriously out tune, and why not. It was everything Monkish, with nothing monkish about it.
Xhosa Cole (tenor), Pat Thomas (piano), Josh Vadiveloo (bass), and Tim Giles (drums), with guests Byron Wallen (trumpet), Tom Challenger (tenor), and Hans Koller (euphonium). (Photos from first set)
