An Exclusive Double Bill: RANDY WESTON TRIO AND KENNY BARRON TRIO
MONK AS MENTOR
Saturday, 10/20/07, 8 pm
Page Auditorium
$38 • $30 • $22 • $5*
Devised especially for Duke, this Following Monk event brings two icons of jazz piano on stage together for the first time, ready to reflect on their links to a third legendary keyboard man, Thelonious Monk.
At 6’8” and 81 years old, Monk’s old friend and former protégé Randy Weston has “the biggest sound of any jazz pianist since Ellington and Monk,” according to jazz critic Stanley Crouch. Weston’s 1990 album Portraits of Thelonious Monk showed how, as Weston says, Monk “put the magic back into the music.” But Weston’s brand of homage moves forward, too. “I’m not copying Monk,” he says. “What I’m trying to do is create a musical portrait of him.”
With nine Grammy nominations and a jazz reputation that spans the globe,
Kenny Barron is simply “the most lyrical piano player of
our time,” as Jazz Weekly says, marshaling “one
of the most fertile imaginations and pleasing sounds in jazz” (Boston
Globe). The maestro has spent a long career reckoning with the Rocky
Mount native’s influence: on the day Monk died (February 17, 1982),
Barron’s band, Sphere, recorded its first full album of the master’s
tunes.
Audio Interview: Kenny Barron and B.H. Hudson, Music Director at WNCU
90.7, discuss Monk's impact on Barron's music.
“When Randy Weston plays, virility and velvet emerge from the keys in an ebb and flow of sound seemingly as natural as the waves of the sea.”
—Langston Hughes
“Melodically gifted, [Kenny Barron] delivers alternately open and dense harmonies that buoy his music; his sure-footed, rippling rhythms make everything flow. His capacity for endearing melodic grace and boisterous swing bring vigor to everything he plays.”
—Newark Star Ledger
Randy Weston on the web:
Kenny Barron on the web: