To celebrate its seventh anniversary, the
Sound It Out concert series – resident at the historic hall of
Greenwich House Music School (46 Barrow Street in New York City’s West Village) – will present an all-star fundraising concert for the school:
“Monk on Guitars 2!” The beyond-capacity first “Monk on Guitars” extravaganza was part of Sound It Out’s fifth-anniversary fundraising festival in 2015, which helped to put much-needed air-conditioning into the century-old Greenwich House venue. The sequel, on
Tuesday June 25 at 7pm, will once again feature a revolving cast of all-star guitarists performing the timeless music of
Thelonious Monk. The six-string lineup is headed by
Andy Summers of The Police (whose 1999 all-Monk album
Green Chimneys is a gem of his solo discography). He will play a mini-set within the night’s show, including solo performances and duets with guitarist
Steve Cardenas and bassist
Michael Formanek. Also in the lineup: guitarist
Miles Okazaki, who recently recorded the complete songbook of Monk on solo guitar (
Work). Ticket proceeds will go to help fund
Greenwich House Music School, whose wonderful hospitality makes Sound It Out possible.
No classic jazz composer’s art so lives and breathes night after night on bandstands across the country and around the world like that of Thelonious Monk. Melodically, harmonically, rhythmically and texturally, Monk’s music is always itself – fresh and accessible, surprising and renewable – even as it is interpreted by generation after generation, yielding new possibilities no matter the instrumental and stylistic variables. “Round Midnight,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Epistrophy,” “In Walked Bud,” “Pannonica,” the list of timeless tunes goes on and on. The stage leader for
“Monk on Guitars 2”is the great young guitarist
Nick Millevoi. The night’s performers will also include guitarists
David Gilmore,
Ricardo Grilli and
Harvey Valdes. Along with Formanek, the bassists are
Stephan Crump and
Jerome Harris. On drums will be
Francisco Mela,
Satoshi Takeishi,
Richie Barshay and
Kate Gentile.
Founded and curated by music journalist
Bradley Bambarger, the
Sound It Out concert series has produced some 300 concerts over its seven seasons, aiming to further a progressive tradition by presenting performances by musicians from jazz and other venturesome genres at the acoustically ideal recital hall of
Greenwich House Music School. Tim Berne's Snakeoil kicked off the series in June 2012, with artists from Wadada Leo Smith to Craig Taborn, Frank Kimbrough to Tyshawn Sorey, Anat Cohen to Fay Victor among the iconic performers to frequent the series. The first Monk on Guitars show, in 2015, featured guitarists Nels Cline, Julian Lage, Rez Abbasi, Miles Okazaki, David Gilmore, Steve Cardenas, Mike Baggetta, Anders Nilsson and Liberty Ellman; the rhythm section players were Stephan Crump and Jerome Harris on bass, plus Colin Stranahan, Richie Barshay and Mark Whitfield Jr. on drums.
Want to experience the sound of Sound It Out from afar? One way is the album
Live in Greenwich Village released by the telepathic trio Renku, featuring saxophonist Michaël Attias, bassist John Hébert & drummer Satoshi Takeishi. Recorded over a two-night stand in the Sound It Out series, the album was released via Clean Feed Records in 2016.
The New York Times has called Sound It Out
“a beacon of adventurous programming in Greenwich Village,”while
Time Out New York described the concert series as “exemplary…
one of the sharper jazz series in town.”