In his own liner notes to this solo CD, Pat Thomas writes: "The challenge with Monk's music is to find your own voice without losing the distinctive shape of a Monk composition." In fact, this is the challenge with an attempt to play ANY well-known player's or composer's music, as this outing well demonstrates.

Pat Thomas has other CDs featuring his piano playing, including the prior solo disk Nur. However, he is perhaps best known as a keyboards/electronics whiz within the Incus constellation of improvisers, arriving saliently on that scene as a participant in Derek Bailey's Company Week. He has since retained this role in a number of settings, including a trio with Derek Bailey and Steve Noble, the London Improvisers Orchestra, and even released an electronica CD (jungle, in this case): "Remembering." His association with Derek Bailey, then, is relatively close.

However, on "Extract one" and many of the sections from the other Bailey pieces, I'd wager that hearing that without prior knowledge of the CD, listeners would be vastly unlikely to even associate it with Derek Bailey. Except perhaps for the serialism-influenced harmony, almost all of the musical elements associated with Bailey's style seem to be missing. The track is much more a function of the piano and its languages than of Bailey's aesthetic or the intent to channel it. The contrast of styles is something like that heard in Bailey's duo with Cecil Taylor in The Berlin Concerts 1988, the Taylor side of things weighing in much more heavily here.

And this raises the question of what one would or should expect from an instrumentalist said to "play the music of" someone like Derek Bailey on piano. Bailey's music is heavily tied to the guitar itself — and not simply because he played guitar. Rather, it's because of the importance of timbral contrasts in his approach to playing. Bailey wrung as many timbral possibilities he could out of a standard jazz guitar setup (with a touch of overdrive thrown in here and there). Thus, a huge part of hearing "his music" was hearing what this guy was inflicting on his trusty Gibson ES-175.

For this recording, Thomas relies on transcriptions of some of Bailey's early pieces. Rather than playing note-for-note reproductions, however, he uses fragments from the transcriptions as springboards for improvisation. Notably, Bailey's timbral pointillism is apparently absent from the transcriptions and Thomas' interpretations of them. Thus, for example, a pluck of the low A string on the guitar followed by a high, C-ish plink behind the guitar's bridge presumably gets notated simply as a low A followed by a very high C. Thomas works some of the loud-soft variance of the piano for contrast, but even this aspect contrasts the smoother decibel gradations Bailey often produced with his volume pedal. Stunningly, Thomas only attacks the piano strings themselves briefly, and it's during his rendition of Monk's "Let's Cool One."

The track where Thomas' approach seems to work best is "Extract 3." Here Thomas begins by apparently playing Bailey's original tone sequence with one hand while doing some rapid atonal scribbling with the other hand. The effect is quite nice. It somehow seems to capture the feel of Bailey's music, perhaps because it loosely approximates what a Bailey duet with Thomas might sound like.

Interestingly, this is also an approach Thomas uses on the standard "My Foolish Heart," but in that context the figure/ground contrast is more jarring. The perfect fits for Thomas' contrastive excursions on this disk, though, are the Monk tunes. "In Walked Bud" is a stunning rendition of that piece. The playfulness of attitude and harmony of the originals mesh with, rather than clash with, Thomas' open-ended development.

The Monk pieces, in comparison with the Bailey ones, suggest that Thomas' playing needs grounding in recognizable contrastive materials to work best, and that the source material needs to be amenable to his outside style. So, since Bailey's notes as divorced from their guitar context fail to be recognizable enough, the cleverness of Thomas' improvisations on those notes does not shine through.