The first single from a forthcoming solo guitar album of Thelonious Monk music by the vaporous "freak folk-jazz" (Vulture, 2019) project of the guitarist "Uncivilized Tom (Csatari)", is a flute-acoustic-guitar duet take on the seminal Monk tune "Blue Monk," which the pianist Marcus Roberts described "sounds like your grandfather sitting on the porch making sure you aren't going anywhere too far" (The New York Times, 1997). The flutist Tristan Cooley — a poet and scholar based in Vermont — has featured on nearly all of the 5 official Uncivilized recordings, "whose sound ... [is] ... a robust part of Mr. Csatari’s slow, open-throated, semibucolic melodies" (The New York Times, 2015). Cooley slips, dips, and slides alongside Csatari's thwarted, devolved, acoustic guitar plucks, chords, solo rips, chunks, splices and reharmonizations: mirroring with tact and stilted grace — a consumate un-gentleman, of sorts.
Preview the full album (out 24 Nov 2023 via Ignore Heroes):
on.soundcloud.com/A6jH6
REFERENCES
hubert laws, freddie green , bobby jasper , bobby broom , peter bernstein , robert dick , paul motian with bill frisell and joe lovano , john scofield playing with joe henderson , slim harpo , bjork's take on "like someone in love" , teddy bunn playing the guitar with his thumb , the side of joe pass jazz guitar which isn't as lame as you thought (he played with ella ) , jim hall disonance / third stream crossover , w/ an unexpected faux-throw-away-impro ending to boot ...
from
blue monk (Feat. Tristan Cooley) [single],
released October 31, 2023
Tom Csatari: acoustic 3/4 Taylor Swift Signature
model guitar with Attila Zoller Shadow Pickup
played into Soundation Software.
Tristan Cooley: C flute.
Artwork: scanned press clipping from a Csatari/
Cooley duo performance in Greenwich Village at
Bonelick BBQ in 2012 (now closed, at the corner
of 7th ave South).