JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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For me, I’d rather listen to Tete Montoliu play solo more than any other single pianist. His 1974 release Songs For Love is one of the reasons.
He has a very consistent approach to material, which is not really a drawback for me.
Take Montoliu’s interpretation of J. van Heusen’s Here’s That Rainy Day. He plays the head respectfully, with some altered harmony, sure, and plenty of passing chords, but it’s plenty recognizable. Then, unable to repress his exuberance, he turns it into a medium swing tune and plays bebop licks over it. Seems like a terrible idea, but Montoliu swings so hard, his harmonic alterations are so creative, and he plays with such joy, that you want to smile along with him.
He does something similar to John Lewis’ Django. After gently stating the theme, he by turns treats the tune like a blues, as a boogie woogie number, and as a swing tune. He turns the tune inside out and upside down until it barely resembles it’s source material and is only recognizable as a Tete Montoliu improvisation.
But Montoliu isn’t just a wonderful interpreter of other people’s music. He’s an excellent composer as well.
Gentofte 4349 has a memorably twisty stop start head. On the solos, he’s improvising to a blistering 4/4, but it’s all in his head. There’s no bass line most of the time. You’ve got the single note bebop lines, and stabs of chord clusters which are voiced closely but not with a lot of dissonance, but within this restriction, Montoliu is endlessly creative. Every once in a while, he’ll interpolate a walking bassline or a pedal point, usually expressed in notes rhythmically pounded away an octave apart. But I’m only scratching the surface.
Part of what makes Montoliu so thrilling to listen to is how quickly his mind works. He’ll come up with more ideas in an eight bar phrase than most people can muster for a whole song. If you want to learn how to improvise bebop lines, I can’t think of a better exercise than to transcribe Tete Montoliu’s solos. Good luck with that.
In most people’s hands, I find pure bebop rather limiting, but Tete Montoliu’s Songs For Love shows that the only limits to bebop lie in the imagination of the musicians who play it.