Tread softly into Jon Batiste’s third volume of his Piano Series, Monk Meditations, drawing on and drawing out a number of introspective solo piano pieces inspired and adapted from Thelonius Monk. It’s one of two Monk-based sets (Monk Movements is its twin) that land on the same day along with a second volume of Black Mozart – August 14. While Movements sees Monk classics, such as the title track of his 1967 album Brilliant Corners, transform into classical piano suites, Batiste’s aim on Meditations is to erase barriers between jazz, blues and classical by embracing a minimalist, ambient New Age route.
Which means the inner character of Monk’s jagged, arresting music, with all its tensions and tales of the unexpected, is turned right down in favour of a soft, glistening solo set that barely ripples the surface. Nevertheless, they are entrancing pieces that could occupy double berths on Radio Three’s Ultimate Calm. Batiste says he spent a solid, formative year listening to Monk, and describes himself as entering “the flow state” when embarking on these recordings. The piano sounds polished to perfection, the air hazy with Pledge, such are the reflective, glistening surfaces of these meditations.
Perhaps meditation is more about surface than depth; or the surface through which you attain depth. It is flawlessly attractive, if often at a remove from the impish Monk spirit. Though that’s not the case on album highlight “Monk’s Mood”, which raises some of disruptive Monk moves while still cleaving to the transparency of the album’s meditative surface. It’s the album’s penultimate piece, with a 90-second reprise of the quietly potent opening track, “Always Know”, bringing a spectral sense of departure and closure, resting on that one piano note that returns us to the beginning, and the silence.
