Monkeying Around with Thelonious Monk

Local saxophonist treats campus to a jazz-filled evening

Somewhere in the northwestern suburbs of Philadelphia in the mid-nineties, a middle-school aged Carl Schultz—falling in love with music—was steeping himself in the sounds of Stravinsky one day and rolling to Rush the next. 

Then came the moment he heard the sound that would change his life forever. 

The song: “Brilliant Corners” by Thelonius Monk—a Jazz that flutters, gyrates, and sways. 

“To be frank, I felt like using the overused expression, ‘That’s so metal.’ Angular. Dissonant.  The vibe,” Schultz said, currently an adjunct lecturer and the jazz studies director at Santa Clara. “It felt like the music I knew and yet it was its own thing.” 

Today, still possessed by the sounds of his youth, Schultz is a saxophonist. After traveling and performing with various musical groups, including The Glenn Miller Orchestra, he moved to the Bay Area and began his time with Santa Clara last quarter. 

On Friday evening, he played a tribute performance alongside drummer Isaac Schwartz and organist Ian McArdle to honor the late and great Monk, one of the founding fathers of improvisational Jazz and bebop.

The trio captured the space and moved exuberant sound with gusto and seeming ease. The first notes to hit the audience soared from the woodwind instrument and settled with power across the auditorium, crooning and trilling in tones of velvet. 

Schultz carried its swerving shape with grace and passion. Each solo ascended crisp, even-tempered, even tranquilizing. 

Isaac Schwartz rattled and rang on the drums, moving ringing beats and pounding accents through the sets. At one point, he tapped and clanged shoulder-jiving solo lines on the rim, a welcome shift in sound that reflected the impact of simple sounds struck in delicate order. 

On keys, Ian McArdle wove finger-arching melodies with ease and dexterity, leaping through chords that sprung one after another in jovial conversation. 

With an effect during “In Walked Bud,” he drew a sound out of the keys that twinkled like stars, almost like the electro-spice soundtrack of a Mario Bros. game (albeit more sophisticated).

All of this in reverence and celebration of Thelonius Monk. 

Schultz gave comment on the process of putting the show together, speaking to Monk’s compositional essence as “simultaneously incredibly specific while leaving room for quite a bit of interpretation.”

“We did not perform all of the pieces as Monk did,” Schultz said. “We came up with arrangements and as we rehearsed them there was an undiscussed evaluation going on. Does this arrangement violate the ‘Monk-ness’ that makes the piece what it is? Once we could answer that question we knew whether or not the arrangement would be used." 

Maintaining this “Monk-ness” while continuing to reinterpret and reimagine their sound seems central to Monk’s life and work—the High Priest of Bebop pioneered improvisation and would surely appreciate the trio’s dedication to his spirit in addition to the nuance. There is holiness in music, of course, and Jazz holds its own ability to move the soul.

A newcomer to Monk’s work, I found myself consistently transported to different scenes and landscapes throughout the performance. Ethereal echoes created dreamlike moments. A canyon, tall and wide and open to dialogue. Then a bumblebee, flitting here and there, spilling over with curiosity and movement. 

The ear and the body must say yes. The mind must choose to still, so that the music may tumble through it and do its work. Listening to Jazz is like a spiritual practice. Schultz certainly embodies what appears to be a spiritual state when making the Jazz on stage, saxophone swinging.

For me, this practice is still being cultivated. I’m not as immediately enraptured as Schultz, Schwartz and McArdle were in their perfect instrumental ecosystem—their euphoria was clear. 

But my foot was definitely swinging.