Having played together off and on for over 40 years,
Steve Lacy
and
Roswell Rudd
are hardly strangers to each other. In the early 1960s, when they led a quartet devoted to
Thelonious Monk
's music, they could barely find anyone to record them (the exception being the
Emanem
LP
School Days
, reissued on CD as
Hat Art
6140); today a
Monk
tribute album is a much more salable item. But despite its title and the presence of two
compositions, the title work and
"Pannonica,"
that's not what this is. Rather, it is a kind of newly recorded
Lacy
sampler, adding to the
tunes: one by
Duke Ellington
(
"Koko"
), three
works that have been recorded previously (
"The Door,"
"The Bath,"
"The Rent"
), and three new
numbers (
"A Bright Pearl,"
"Traces,"
"Grey Blue"
). The familiarity of the players -- who, in addition to
Rudd
, include
's regular rhythm section of
Jean-Jacques Avenel
John Bestsch
-- is both good news and bad news. Certainly, they sound comfortable with each other, but also, given their long association and the mostly familiar material, they don't seem to have been greatly challenged. They sound most comfortable with the
tunes and take some chances with the
Ellington
, but on
's tunes they sometimes stretch out pointlessly. This is particularly the case on the nearly 12-minute
which
wrote for a film about a bum who gets to take a bath for the first time in years. The song begins playfully, but it runs on and on until you'd think
was trying to play every possible note on the trombone.
Monk's Dream
is a warm reunion of old friends, but those friends could have tried a little harder to come up with something fresh. ~ William Ruhlmann