If pianist Monty Alexander’s life weren’t a true story, some Hollywood screenwriter would have had to make it up.
He was born on D-Day, June 6, 1944, far from the shores of Normandy. He was delivered instead to the shores of Jamaica. And by the time his family moved from Kingston to Miami when he was a teenager, he was already a working musician, playing with many of the people who were helping to create the sound of ska.
He played sessions for producers like Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid and Chris Blackwell, alongside musicians including the great Jamaican trombonist Don Drummond.
Alexander was largely self-taught. He never studied formally and never really learned to read music.
What he had was an extraordinary ear. When his family moved to Miami, that gift set off an almost unbelievable chain of events.
Still a teenager, Alexander was playing in the lounge of a Miami Beach nightclub when Frank Sinatra and his close friend Jilly Rizzo came in. They were so taken with the young musician that they convinced him to move to New York.
Alexander arrived in New York and began playing at Jilly’s, the nightclub owned by Rizzo. Suddenly, the kid from Kingston, still a teenager, was playing with some of the most exciting musicians of the day.
And then one night, Miles Davis walked in. He tells me: “Miles comes to me and he writes down his phone number on a phone book, and he just say, ‘Come on by the house.’ Next thing you know, I’m hanging out at Miles’ house.”
Soon Alexander became part of a musical world he had previously known mostly through records, becoming friends with some of the most iconic musicians and artists of the day. At 82, Alexander seems to carry around an entire history of 20th-century music in his head.
And you can hear it when he plays.
His music moves easily between bebop, blues, calypso, ska and reggae. He can play funk with elegance and take a Jamaican folk song as seriously as a jazz standard.
He says much of it happened almost by accident. “Everything in my life is one bunch of blessed mistake, mistake after mistake,” he explains.
Had his family never left Jamaica? “Man, I’d be climbing a coconut tree. That’s about it, really. I had no ambition. I was a lazy kid. It was just playing the piano.”
Instead, he became one of the most celebrated jazz pianists of his generation, with more than 80 albums and a career that has taken him around the world.
“It’s getting to the point, like I’m forgetting what I’ve done,” he says.
But the one thing he has not forgotten is the reason he started in the first place. Joy. “I’m a student of joy,” he says. “I’m not no politician. I am not no preacher, but I’m an encourager. I’m here to bring a little positivity.”
Alexander will be encouraging positivity at Birdland in New York this week.
His new album, A Jamarican in Paris, comes out October 2.
