John Beasley's MONK'estra and pianist Helen Sung reimagine jazz sounds of the 1940s for a new era
Bebop, and the influence of Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, drive two standout pianists at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival
John Beasley
Helen Sung
The Vancouver International Jazz Festival will stream Bouncin’ With Bud: Helen Sung, Steve Smith, Lonnie Plaxico at 10:30 pm on June 26. John Beasley’s MONK’estra Septet’s online concert airs at 10:30 pm on June 30.
NO ONE REALLY knows when bebop was born. Was it in 1937, when the music’s primary architect, Charlie “Bird” Parker, sat in with Count Basie’s drummer Jo Jones and reputedly had a cymbal thrown at his head? Was it in 1941, when Parker’s associate Thelonious Monk was hired as house pianist at Harlem nightclub Minton’s Playhouse, and began assembling a wildly creative cast of future luminaries? Or did it all begin in 1945, when the Savoy label issued Parker’s debut as a bandleader, “Ko Ko”?
Decades later, the debate still rages. What’s certain, though, is that by the time of Parker’s death in 1955, bebop had become the language of jazz—and it still is. Cool jazz, Latin jazz, free jazz, soul jazz, and jazz-rock fusion all followed the first beboppers’ inventions, but the music that Parker and his cohort made in the 1940s is undimmed by time or competition.
And for proof, one need look no further than the online concerts John Beasley and Helen Sung will present as part of this year’s Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Although both are brilliant composers as well as virtuosic pianists on their own, Beasley’s MONK’estra wouldn’t exist without the work of its titular guru, and Sung’s jazz-fest set will be devoted exclusively to material associated with Monk’s friend and pianistic rival Bud Powell.
And if there’s anything odd about updating the radical music of the 1940s for the 2020s, Beasley, for one, doesn’t see it.
“Historically, this has been happening for hundreds of years, right?” he contends, in a telephone interview from his home outside New York City. “I’ve been playing a little [Alexander] Scriabin, the Russian composer—piano preludes and stuff—and he has a piece that’s built around a [Johann Sebastian] Bach prelude. So that’s, what, 200 years later? Classical composers have been doing this for a long time, and, really, the beginning of jazz was built upon tunes like ‘Hold that Tiger’, ‘Back Home in Indiana’… It’s part of the tradition of what we do.”
Parker would agree, having told a contemporary interviewer that he’d based the aforementioned “Ko Ko” on the chord changes to swing bandleader Ray Noble’s 1938 hit “Cherokee”. "I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes,” he said, “I could play the thing I'd been hearing."
It’s important to mention that neither Beasley nor Sung will be playing their mentors’ music “straight”. Although Sung’s trio with bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Steve Smith hews closely to Powell’s preferred format, Beasley specializes in the near-cinematic expansion of bop mainstays—as can be heard in the exuberant version of Parker’s “Donna Lee” featured on his latest recording, MONK’estra plays John Beasley. By further abstracting Bird’s harmonies and playing up the Afro-Cuban rhythms that fascinated the saxophonist, the tune is turned into a sonic portrait of modern-day life in New York City, just as bop’s vertiginous harmonies mirrored the era of the great Deco skyscrapers.
Ruminating on how both bebop and its latter-day reimaginings draw on multiculturalism—and pointing out the 6/8 rhumba he inserted into his take on “Donna Lee” can ultimately be traced back to West Africa—Beasley also comments on how “jazz” can be a source of limitation as well as freedom. “Miles did not like the word ‘jazz’,” he says, referring to his one-time employer (and Parker protege) Miles Davis. “He preferred to call it ‘social music’, and when you think of it that way, it’s about societies moving across continents. Jazz is very much like griot society in West Africa, by way of Cuba, by way of South Carolina—the [African] diaspora.”
Bebop by way of classical
The music’s curious elasticity—and its reliance on the oral tradition, which of course encompasses recordings—is also exemplified by Helen Sung’s path into mastery. Born in Houston, Texas, to immigrant parents of Chinese descent, she was training to become a classical pianist when she found her true calling almost by accident. “I didn’t have any kind of orderly jazz education,” she says with a laugh, on the phone from New York. “I was just listening to what I read about in books, and what people told me. But I did notice that bebop was something different than the other genres of jazz, at least in my experience. It was very challenging; it was really hard to sound good playing bebop, you know!”
She picked up the basics quickly enough that she was tapped to become part of the inaugural class at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz), which brought her to New York City and introduced her to her mentor, first-generation bebop pianist Barry Harris.
“I started learning that bebop was something I really needed to get a handle on, because this was foundational in terms of jazz language and harmonic language, and all that stuff,” she explains. “So I really credit Barry Harris with unpacking the mystery… No, let’s put it this way: helping me unlock the mystery a little bit. And, you know, he carries the torch for Bud Powell, so I just learned so many Bud Powell tunes and I did so many transcriptions, because i wanted to sound convincing and authentic in the comping and the soloing—all of it! So now I would consider Bud Powell part of my foundation as a jazz musician, and I’m so grateful that I was able to learn from Barry Harris.”
There’s a moment during the concert stream that Sung will present when the camera beams in on her fingers from overhead—and although the music is purely Powellesque, the motion will remind many of the piano mechanics necessary to play Frédéric Chopin properly. That’s not just Sung’s early training on display; the pianist points out that Powell also began as a student of classical music, although in the 1930s and ‘40s that path would have been blocked to him because of the colour of his skin.
Powell, she notes had a “muscular virtuosity” as a pianist that she finds continually inspiring. “I think he goes toe to toe with Charlie Parker in a way that nobody else did at that time—and the way he plays is actually quite unique. His left hand is more percussive and very sparse, in some ways, especially at the higher tempos. It kind of propels his right hand. And there’s his touch: the clarity of his playing. It’s just sheer virtuosity, together with the beauty of his lines, the melodic nature of his lines. It’s a very special combination, and very hard to replicate! But I aspire to that.”
As for Davis’s contention that jazz is “social music”, there’s another moment in Sung’s concert stream that bears this out. Early on in the program, after some especially heated three-way improvising, she looks up from the keyboard and launches a beaming smile at drummer Smith. Anyone who’s ever spent any time on a bandstand will recognize that this reflects the moment when you know that the music will be fine, or more than fine—what makes this particular instance special is that Sung and Smith had never played together before their videotaped encounter. Almost all she knew about Smith, she confesses, was that in addition to being a jazz bandleader in his own right, he was also the drummer for pop-rock platinum-sellers Journey.
Even more startlingly, Sung reveals, was the three musicians didn’t rehearse before documenting their meeting.
“We kind of ran through the heads a couple of times, basically right before they started filming. And that’s, again, another wonderful thing about jazz music: that it’s a language, and I’m just so thrilled to be conversant in that language.”
Sung, Smith, and Plaxico are certainly fluent jazz conversationalists—as are Beasley and the other musicians in his septet version of the MONK’estra. And if the form is accepting of change and growth, consider the next projects the two pianists will embark upon. This fall, Sung will release Quartet Plus, which will include five of her original compositions as well as work by Geri Allen, Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Marian McPartland; on it, Sung’s own band will be joined by the strings of the Harlem Quartet. Meanwhile, Beasley has spent his pandemic year exchanging charts with Swedish saxophonist Magnus Lindgren for an expansive tribute to Charlie Parker that will be recorded later this year by Stuttgart, Germany’s SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra.
As ever, Bird got there first: Charlie Parker with Strings, from 1950, was his biggest commercial success as well as one of the first times that bebop melodies and orchestral arrangements came together. But that doesn’t mean the bebop pioneer’s work can’t be expanded upon.
“We’re trying to take the concept a step further, by acknowledging that Charlie Parker was deeply interested in Charles Ives and [Igor] Stravinsky and the contemporary composers of his generation,” Beasley explains. “He was talking with Edgard Varèse before he passed away about actually going to Paris and studying. So….knowing that Bird was into these other composers and more contemporary music, that record is more of an MOR [middle-of-the-road] record to me. Charlie Parker’s definitely the deepest thing on that record, so the notion is that we can take his music and try to push it in the direction he was heading when he passed away.”
Icons can die, in other words, but their music can be perpetually reborn.
Hear more of Alexander Varty’s interviews on the Stir It Up podcast, at our Jazz Fest Guide here.
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