Jazz pianist Monty Alexander may be a little tired of all that 'jazz b.s.',but the sounds of his native home of Jamica still inspire him, he tells Ray Comiskey.
Now almost 58, Monty Alexander comes across as an incredibly friendly, down-to-earth man with a ready access to his emotions; they always seem close to the surface of his conversation. He retains such a passion for music in general, and for jazz and the sounds of his native Jamaica in particular, that even a degree of disillusionment with some aspects of the current scene can't diminish it.
It's all reflected, too, in the swinging, visceral way he plays piano. He likes nothing better than to groove, to establish the kind of musical intimacy with his colleagues that comes from the heart rather than the intellect. And that, he says, is a characteristic of the jazzmen he has really connected with as a player - people such as his great friend, bassist Ray Brown, and the late great vibes player, Milt Jackson. It's also a feeling he shares with the traditional musicians of his own country, with whom he has worked and recorded in recent years.
Instinct and soul are important to him. Much as he loves music, when he got a few piano lessons in Kingston as a child he couldn't stand the restraint. "Oh, I hated it," he says. "I mean, going to any school or teachers situation was dread. Because I was loving - you know what it was? - the camaraderie that comes in the music, the musicians getting along with one another, laughing and telling stories, and when I got welcomed into the fold from a very young age, that to me was the greatest compliment."
He also belongs at the younger end of a generation of Caribbean, bop-influenced jazz musicians that made their mark in the 1950s away from home - people such as trumpeters Shake Keane and Dizzy Reece, the gifted alto saxophonist Joe Harriott and tenor saxophonist Wilton "Bogey" Gaynair. It was an extraordinary flowering for such a small, out-of-the-way population.
"You're absolutely right," he responds, "and the way you put it is really great because I always thought that. To this day, if I put on a recording and I hear Dizzy Reece, or I hear Roland Alfonso, who didn't leave Jamaica, they have such a unique personality coming out in their instruments.
"I mean, today, when you hear guys playing and there's so much 'jazz' going around, I can't tell one from the other, you know. And this is not to knock, or anything, but they didn't have a chance today to be individuals. For some reason you don't find that unique stamp of each personality. Whereas out in Jamaica you could tell a Gaynair from Roland Alfonso, from Joe Harriott."
The lack of early, rigorous academic training, as well as culture, is a contributory factor. For Alexander, it was all done by ear; even now he doesn't read music. He got his musical training soaking up the sounds around him, "playing in a hotel for the tourists, cocktail piano, or you'd hear a calypso band. I just heard American songs, Nat King Cole singing, Bing Crosby. So on an awareness of jazz at an intellectual level, I can't tell you much about it. But it really was alive and it got in my bones from very young".
He also had his own pop group, Monty and the Cyclones, which had chart hits in Jamaica when he was a teenager. What was it like when he first heard himself on a recording? "Biggest thrill in the world," he says. "Biggest kick. Amazed. Delighted. It's like I came out of the groove several miles in height. I'm on this little thing you can spin on a machine. That's a part of the whole thing of acceptance. Because you're sitting there, listening to, say, George Shearing playing Tenderly, and you get 'wow, listen to that! This man made that all the way up there in New York City, and I'm down there in Kingston!'
"I remember the beginnings of the recording industry in Jamaica, seeing all those cutting machines when you first record, and the acetate, all that shellac stuff is all over the floor, the smell of it. And I remember the feeling when a record was made in a house, and to this day, when a tape rolls and you're being recorded, it's a different vibe with yourself, something deep in your subconscious - 'I better watch what I say and what I play.'"
Notwithstanding the Cyclones, by the time his family settled in Florida when he was 18, he already had the mark of jazz on his forehead. His later jazz recordings show some of Oscar Peterson's influence, but does that not also imply the effect of earlier players such as the prodigious virtuoso pianist, Art Tatum?
"The roots of all that whole thing for me started with some piano players in Kingston who were two-fisted, guys who must have played stride [a 1920s Harlem piano style] - nobody very sophisticated. My hero was a guy called Eddie Heywood [a US jazz pianist, popular in the US in the 1940s] because he had these commercial hits and they got over somewhat.
"But then that was an introduction to Errol Garner. And then I heard my hero of all, to this day, Nat King Cole."
Outside of jazz, it's not widely known that Cole was a jazz pianist of the front rank before his singing took over. "OK. So I heard all these people. And then I heard Oscar Peterson. That kind of knocked me out in a different direction. But I have to confess it was the influence of Ray Brown on the bass - who to me is like one of the kingpins - because I loved rhythm 'n' blues and when I heard Ray Brown play I heard a jazz musician, but he was rocking the band like it was a whole rhythm 'n' blues band."
His rise in the jazz world was rapid, as a CV that includes Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Milt Jackson underlines. Jackson, with whom he played in a band that included Ray Brown and the acclaimed tenor saxophonist, Teddy Edwards, was a swinger with a natural feel for gospel music that came through in his vibes playing.
"Yes," says Alexander. "He says: 'Man, my mother made me get up and go to church every day of my life.' There was a part of that he loved and that was in his spirit. He couldn't help it when he played. He would play a melody and I'd swear I was listening to a gospel singer. You know, Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington. He was a very quiet man, didn't say much and he was truly one of my great meaningful relationships."
With more than 50 recordings to his name, Alexander is firmly established in jazz, but not everything he hears nowadays is to his taste, and he has begun to gravitate back to his musical roots in Jamaica and work and record with hometown guys.
"To be honest with you, I'm so kind of, like, disheartened with a lot of what goes on in the so-called jazz scene and got so turned off - maybe some of it's me - but so much has happened that I says I got to go home, and even if you're not hearing some way-out jazz music, at least you're hearing something that has a lot of love in it. Because we play this music that's a reflection of something that means a lot to me and all the people that are playing it.
"That's why I've been doing these recordings that have a strong Jamaican tilt to it. I'm disenchanted with the whole jazz 'b.s.', I call it. I don't know, maybe I'm speaking out too much here," he laughs deprecatingly. "I find a great sense of meaning, you know, doing something with my home country and what comes out of there."
Despite this, the trio he's bringing to Dublin has unimpeachable jazz credentials. His bassist, Brandon Owens, he says, is "like a young Oscar Pettiford" (one of the seminal voices on the instrument) and his drummer is Britain's Mark Taylor, who "can swing a big band like Sam Woodyard [Ellington's old drummer] and turn around and play all those nice essences that you like to have.
"And that's a thing about our music. It's still a folk music - that's a bunch of folks making that thing. Ray Brown told me himself: 'I'm sitting in this hotel room, looking across the bed, and who am I looking at? One is Max Roach, the other one is Dizzy Gillespie, another one is Bud Powell [three all-time jazz greats on their instruments] and I'm thinking:'Man, look at this. I'm in a room playing cards with these guys.' And that's what you hear in the music. It's folk music, right?"
The Monty Alexander Trio plays at Vicar Street on Wednesday, May 15th, as part of the ESB Jazz Series