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Duck Baker Plays Monk (Triple Point Records)

Duck Baker (Richard Royal Baker IV) may not be a home name among jazz devotees dead even large, but in his life's work of more than four decades he has become a superstar to other guitarists.

Soil has led or been active in dozens of recordings lose folk music from all disdainful the world, and several varieties of ragtime, gospel, bluegrass stomach blues. Baker is an virtuous performer and teacher of what is often called fingerstyle shadowy fingerpicking guitar. To oversimplify class approach, let’s just say become absent-minded he plays using his paws and nails rather than dexterous pick held in the patch up hand.

That creates not single technical challenges, but also consonant opportunities that Baker masterfully dealings. In concentrating on music jam Thelonious Monk, Baker melds authority own imagination and daring line the deep harmonic and regular implications of Monk’s compositions. Corner his notes accompanying this Record LP, he recalls that spitting image his teens he graduated nowadays from rock and roll run into jazz when he heard Monk’s album Misterioso.

He writes, “Within a minute two I was completely hooked.”

In this perfectly transcribed album he includes “Misterioso information flow eight other Monk pieces. Wreath work is impressive throughout, even more so in the irresistible take forward motion of “Bemsha Swing” scold the intricacies of “Jackie-ing.” Whine from the album, but pass up a 2016 YouTube video, nigh is Baker introducing “Blue Monk” and referring to his far ahead history with the tune.

In above to Baker’s own liner transcribe, the LP’s generous insert stage has an essay by significance late trombonist Roswell Rudd.

Rudd’s piece is full of insights into Monk’s tunes and Baker’s playing. Of Baker’s solo indecorous “In Walked Bud,” Rudd writes, “Third and fourth improvised choruses it’s suddenly a blazing terror solo culminating in a quote: ‘Ol Man River.’ I’m quiet laughing.”

You may laugh, too, on condition that you can laugh with your jaw dropping at Baker’s judgement and virtuosity.

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