When guitarist Miles Okazaki was a young boy discovering jazz, the music of Thelonious Monk opened the door to an entirely new musical universe.
It wasn't just the sound of Monk's piano playing that captured his imagination. It was the idea that a piece of music could take on a life of its own — that one musician could write something that others might continue to explore and reinvent for generations.
"It was these tunes,” he remembers. “It was of course the way he played the instrument as well. But really what grabbed me were these songs. And the fact that somebody can write a thing and somebody else can play it. This whole idea that you could make a thing that other people could use, you know? Durable goods that last through the decades that other people, you know, turn into all kinds of other things."
It helped that Monk's music was particularly well suited to the guitar.
He says, "Monk's music is very well-suited to the guitar, you know, because of the types of voicings that he used. You can play the same notes that Monk played, you know. You can translate those onto guitar. But then how you do it depends on the person."
And from an early age, Okazaki was the kind of person who liked asking questions and following them to their logical conclusions.
He once wrote an entire book exploring the possibilities of the guitar, including a seemingly simple question: How many different ways are there to play three notes?
Miles explains, "It is usually in an effort to say, 'Well, here's an idea. How big is this idea?' You know, 'How do I get my mind around this problem? I'm not sure I would trade that process just to get the answer. It's not really about the answer, it's about how big is the problem."
In 2017, during the centennial celebration of Monk's birth, Okazaki began recording the composer's music, one tune at a time, as a personal study. Eventually, he'd recorded all 66 compositions, releasing them the following year as a six-album collection called Work.
Then a producer suggested he take the project one step further: perform the entire Monk songbook in a single evening, from memory, and film it.
He was skeptical at first: "That's probably gonna be not possible, you know? 'Cause first of all, it's an endurance issue, you know, and it's an interest issue. It's like, is this interesting? So I just, you know, I asked him to, well, you know, give me a year, you know, to practice and let me see if I can work it up."
In 2024, at New York's Jazz Gallery, Okazaki did just that, performing the entire songbook on solo guitar over the course of more than five hours. Two days later, he did it again.
Filmmaker Frank Heath captured the performances for a new film called The Monkathon. He also documented Okazaki's preparation, which happened to coincide with his training for the New York City Marathon, which he ran just two weeks after the concerts.
For Okazaki, the two endeavors had something in common. Both required months of preparation, but ultimately, there comes a point when the preparation has to stop.
"Well, you can't prepare anymore once you're, you know, on stage. You just have to hope that your preparation was adequate. You know it's in there, it's just a matter of am I gonna access that thing?” he says.
But despite the enormous amount of work that went into the project, Okazaki doesn't consider himself particularly disciplined.
"It's just that I'm interested in things, and when I get interested in things, I just do them. It's the things that you do because you're passionate about them that they're sustaining. You don't think about how much time it takes. You're just doing it, you know? And for me it's all about doing one thing at a time very slowly is how you get a lot of stuff done," he explains.
Okazaki has been returning to Monk's music for more than forty years. And he says each time he revisits it, he hears something different. Not because the music has changed, but because he has.
"It shows you what's changed about you because the music didn't change, right? ... It's still there. It's the same record as it always was. Let me go back and see if I hear something new. And it always is. I always hear something new,” he says
The Monkathon premieres today at Roulette in Brooklyn. The complete four-part concert film will be available free to the public indefinitely at Monkathon.com beginning October 10, Thelonious Monk's birthday. See and hear my full conversation with Miles Okazaki about The Monkathon and more here.
