Monk laughs when he remembers. “I saw him do it and I said, ‘Okay, I want that! I want you to do that!’ And that’s great. When you start writing for people, you know how they play. That’s something Duke Ellington said. I think part of the success of what I do is about knowing the player.” Navarro is a jazz player, but the bandoneón on the tune is played by the esteemed Argentine tango artist Néstor Marconi. “I told him, ‘Maestro, do whatever you want, because I know your style will fit, I just want you to finish it this way.’ That tune is one of my best musical portraits, I think, because it has a little bit of everything.”
Unlike, say, Ellington’s portraits of Louis Armstrong or Bert Williams, Monk’s are self-portraits. Born in Buenos Aires to a musical family (“Everyone is a musician”), he moved here in 2001 to study at Berklee, joined by his wife, the tango dancer Fernanda Cajide. She’ll be featured at Saturday’s performance, along with the dance group BoSoma, which has choreographed one of Monk’s tunes.
Monk says that even with his extended forms, the dance rhythms are the backbone, and he likes to keep solos tight and “precise” in his tango pieces, preferring the “trading” of eight-, four-, and two-bar breaks to longish solos. “A friend of mine, his father said, ‘Watch the dancers’ feet. If they’re moving okay, you’re playing okay.’ ” And, I add, the dancers are improvising too. “Yes, they’re improvising, but if you’re playing with a few cats, you’re responding to what you’re hearing — your ear as a listener and a musician is different from your ear as a dancer. And that’s one of the problems I have with my wife! When I dance with her, she says, ‘What are you doing?’ And I say, ‘But listen to the violins.’ ‘Don’t worry about the violins, worry about the bass!’ But I can’t just listen to that boom-boom-boom! So it’s very interesting. And she’s very musical, but when it’s about dancing, it’s about the beat. Eventually I understood that.”
In Argentina, the repressive military regime of the ’70s and ’80s discouraged experimentalists like Piazzolla, who eventually went into exile. The evolution of the music, says Monk, came to a stop. Sweet imported pop was the norm, and tango was relegated to being “old people’s music.” Now, he says, tango is picking up again, but it’s geared toward tourists, the styles of the ’30s and ’40s that they expect to hear. And once again there are pockets of innovation. The musicians of Monk’s generation are investigating the music of their grandparents — a music their parents ignored. His migration to Boston was a way to pursue that other love — jazz.
“Unfortunately, sometimes you take the train in the last station, but you missed all the other ones. If you listen to Bird, Trane, Michael Brecker, you don’t have a history, a line. And then suddenly, to be here helped me a lot to understand. I mean, this music makes sense, as this music [tango] makes sense down there [Argentina].”
You need listen only to the a cappella “Metamorfosis” and the following “Altohólico” to hear Monk’s fluid jazz chops in bold relief — and the influence of Boston teachers like Joe Lovano, George Garzone, and Jerry Bergonzi. So where did he decide on his current path?
