Montgomery Bernard Alexander was only 18 years old when he met Frank Sinatra on his way, an encounter that changed his life, and which ultimately made him one of the greats of jazz with a mixture of European tradition and Caribbean sounds supported by the African rhythms. Music that this Sunday will close this edition of the Terassa Jazz Festival, accompanied by Luke Sellick on double bass and Jason Brown on Drums (Nova Jazz Cava, 7pm). The Jamaican is a veteran of the festival, which he has already attended in its first editions, maintaining his presence over the years.
Monty Alexander’s sympathy is transmitted over the phone from New York, the city he ended up in thanks to La Voz when he proposed to his friend Jill Rizzo to hire him for the place he ran in Manhattan, Jilly’s Saloon, the refuge to which Sinatra went when he wanted to have a Jack Daniel’s with his friends.
It was in that establishment on 52nd Street that the pianist met the cream of the New York music scene while playing until the sun came up. “These people were always up and I kept playing the piano,” he says, recalling how Miles Davis approached him one night. “He came to the club and sat by the piano with two pretty girls and a friend.” Monty doesn’t remember what he was playing, only that the big trumpeter approached him “and he asked me in his hoarse voice: where did you learn to play?”, whereupon he wrote his phone number on a cardboard box. matches. That was how he began to go home “just him and me, and we became friends, we liked boxing,” he recalls, detailing Davis’ admiration for Clark Terry, or how on one occasion they went together to Madison Square Garden to see a fight between Muhammad Ali and the Uruguayan Alfredo Evangelista.
This relationship with the brilliant trumpet player could have materialized in a joint project. One night, when they were 19 or 20, they went to the Village Vanguard, and there Miles proposed to him to produce a record, but Monty felt intimidated. “I was afraid of him because he was a genius,” he explains, adding that “I was making my own music and I didn’t want anyone telling me to do this or do that” so “I just didn’t say anything”.
And it is that the veteran pianist is self-taught, which is why he says that what he plays is not jazz, but “the music of Monty Alexander”. “I never went to an academy, I didn’t know how to read sheet music, I learned with my ears, my enthusiasm, my passion”, he explains, remembering that he doesn’t like to talk about jazz, that he touches life. As a child, in his native Jamaica, he would run away from school to play with his compatriots, the same ones who brought reggae to the world. That was his school, without music theory or sheet music, playing since he was a child while he listened to Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong or Earl Garner, “royalty” as he calls them.
But it is above all from Africa that the musical substrate of the veteran pianist comes from. “It was the Africans who started playing the drums and the rhythms,” he says, explaining how they used music to express themselves and tell stories. “Rhythms are the beat of life, like your own heartbeat, boom, boom, boom.”
Alexander connects these African rhythms with those of the Caribbean, “the West African rhythms went to Trinidad, to Jamaica, and you know what? To New Orleans, and that’s where Louis Armstrong grew up, with African rhythms.” A heritage that lives on “even in hip hop, even though they use electronics, what they try to do is create that rhythm that makes people dance.”
Because this is what music is for, explains the pianist, to make people dance. “When Duke Ellington wrote those great songs, he made sure that people could feel his rhythm and dance,” he explains, “and that comes from Jamaica and of course from Africa”, an origin that mixed with the “great influence of jazz European” among other places through Spain. “The Muslims brought their music and their voices, which are very similar to those of Naples.” Some similarities that he also finds in flamenco, which he considers “like the blues of American jazz”.
This mixture is what the music of Monty Alexander draws, defending the “best way to define jazz is like freedom” distancing himself from those who have turned this style into something “intellectual”. “Rhythm is what makes jazz so contagious, when you’re swinging.”
