AHMED - Play Monk

After six albums digging through the pages of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the quartet Ahmed changes course for the first time and turns its attention to Thelonious Monk, the pianist Abdul-Malik played with in the late Fifties. The move has a precise logic: the two shared a refusal of predictable phrasing, building tension through rhythmic irregularity and musical syncopations landing out of place. Ahmed inherits that same instability and pushes it to its most extreme consequences; the trigger dates back to 2023, when the four of them, during a concert in Novara, launched into a spontaneous rendition of "Evidence". From there, recorded during the same London sessions as "Sama’a (Audition)", comes "Play Monk": a double CD that has nothing to do with the concept of a cover.

The difference from previous works, however, is substantial: with Abdul-Malik the group was unearthing near-forgotten material; with Monk it attacks the heart of the canon, among the most reinterpreted pieces in the history of jazz. Take "Round Midnight", nothing less than the most-covered jazz composition ever written by a single author. Yet Ahmed shows no deference: the versions are stretched to unthinkable lengths compared to the originals, as if Monk's structure were a launchpad rather than a sacred text to be read dogmatically. "Evidence", barely three minutes in its 1948 original, becomes here a thirty-minute howl: tempo doubled, Gerbal hammering away as if possessed, Seymour Wright's saxophone slashing through the air like Peter Brötzmann, raving the same micro-phrase dozens of times over, Pat Thomas's piano stretching Monk's minor seconds until they turn acidic and swirling.

The result is music that dismantles rather than reveres: Pat Thomas commits pianistic blasphemies that sound inevitable, taking Monk's harmonic distortions and pushing them to the breaking point, in avalanches of chords that seem to plunge into chaos only to reassemble into something brutally logical. Gerbal and Grip keep a rhythm section permanently on the verge of collapse, the groove forever on the point of crumbling, as if keeping time were a choice to be put off until the very last moment, with obstinate passages repeated until they scatter into another avalanche of sound. Wright travels unpredictable paths: recognisable phrases that degenerate into shrieks and noise, into something closer to guitar feedback than a wind instrument. Yet beneath all this fury Monk's voice survives, not as a nostalgic quotation but as the skeleton holding up the entire sonic architecture: not foundations to be venerated, but to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch every single time.

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12/06/2026