Monty celebrates 50 years of music

Gordon Williams, Contributor

On the eve of the first show to launch his celebration of 50 years as a professional musician, Monty Alexander had no right being nervous.

The Jamaican jazz great knows his audience. He's treated them to thousands of live shows - in cafés, clubs and concert halls around the world - and more than 70 albums.

The man who has played with music's biggest names - from Americans Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington and Quincy Jones to Jamaica's Ernest Ranglin, Roland Alphonso, Bob Marley and Sly and Robbie - knows his stuff too. After doing it so long, maybe it's time, after all, to reflect.

"It's something to celebrate," he says of the half century on the blocks. "I'm amazed I've come this far."

Everyone who has watched Alexander work, starting as a teenager in the Kingston studios of Coxson Dodd and Duke Reid, is clear what the man at the grand piano can do. It's the reason they keep coming back.

Yet Alexander still gets the same compulsion each time he goes out on stage. Anxiety? Probably. Jitters? Probably not.

"Are you joking?" he blurts out with a laugh in the beginning from his base in New York. "How can I be nervous? The first time I sat at a piano I was three years old! Sitting at a piano is where I live. It's like going home."

Except, "going home" - especially after some time away - means there's need to prove to those who know him best that he is the same or even better than the last time they saw him. Alexander never expects the bar to be lowered.

"Every time I go to perform there is a sense of excitement," he finally admitted. "I play music to make people happy. That's my honour."

Despite the years, the young man who left Jamaica to try his hand in a profession he still embraces with unbridled passion, is still defending that honour. The road to cultivating it was paved somewhere in the mid-1950s, when the 12-year-old Alexander watched Louis Armstrong at the Carib Theatre in Cross Roads. Like other high-profile American entertainers at the time who performed in Jamaica, such as Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Brook Benton and Nat King Cole, Alexander noted that Armstrong served up joy. The audience swallowed whole.

"I saw that and I wanted to do that too," Alexander recalled. "It was a defining moment for me.

"The biggest thing I have is that I have been given a gift and it is up to me never to forget that I have to share that, to make even one person smile," he added later. "It's a big responsibility. You have to feel that."

It's what has pushed Alexander over the years. He never had more than a sliver of early formal musical training - four years of piano lessons, starting around age nine - and he still doesn't read music. He abandoned the classical mould when it threatened to fence in his rebellious spirit, and set out on a journey that, even today, seems far from over.

At 66, Alexander sounds in the same hurry to explore the world that has made him both successful and happy, a rare combination in a

profession that can demand sacrifice of one or the other.

"It's the quickest ride," he said of the past 50 years. "It's a blur. The whole journey is a story."

Yet Alexander admitted he hardly stops to take notes. Friends tell him he should write a book. One way he puts dates to significant career events is by looking at his past album covers. Another is linking those events to others, such as a world title fight which, as a keen boxing fan, Alexander is able to do.

"Other than that," he said, "it's like one year rolling into another."

It's hardly monotonous. Alexander, listed among the top five in Hal Leonard's book 'The Fifty Greatest Jazz Piano Players of All Time', said he is immersed in the discovery of his art. It is filled with fledgling ideas and multiple ongoing projects, some bubbling over into others. For the first time, he even plans to sing.

The "50th year shows" kicked off last week (April 5) at the Birdland in New York. Others in the city will follow. The "tour" will branch out elsewhere in the United States.

In the meantime, Alexander is promoting a couple of compact discs (CDs), including Uplift and Harlem-Kingston Express, a musical journey from his homeland to the African-American cultural hub. They feature music from live performances in the United States and Europe.

"It's like a train going through Kingston - '60s and '70s - up to Harlem (New York)," he explained. "I bring these two together."

Alexander is crafting a CD featuring his own compositions - a sort of "Monty Plays Monty" arrangement of Alexander's songs with him going solo on piano - set to come out later this year. He is also working on a CD, for possible release next year, featuring names from varying genres - such as reggae crooners Tarrus Riley and Maxi Priest and jazz singer George Benson - plus several noted instrumentalists like jazz trumpeters Arturo Sandoval and Roy Hargrove.

"I'm kinda bringing the Jamaican vibes to popular music," Alexander said. "You feel the rhythm from home."

Alexander says that effort - with a loose-working title Love Songs From The Islands - will offer a "different approach entirely.

"People who like '50s and '60s music should like it," he added.

not trapped in a capsule

But "rubbing shoulders with" American greats like Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery and Duke Ellington over decades has not blinkered Alexander from the present and future. He said he is not trapped in a capsule that excludes appreciation of modern-day popular music. Some of the sounds that dominate today's airwaves, he admits, do not satisfy his craving for a well-written song with beautiful melodies. But he accepts that music changes, often a product of the times.

"It is what it is," Alexander said. "It is people expressing themselves with what they have and what they know.

"It is very, very creative, but it is 99 per cent departure from the continuum of how music was being made through the decades. The creativity is different."

Back in the day, Alexander declared, "the music was more of a hopeful thing."

Yet not much has changed about Alexander. He was born on June 6, 1944, known as 'D-Day' during World War II, when the Allied Forces launched a decisive invasion of Normandy, France that eventually led to the end of Nazi Germany and WWII.

"That's how we won the war," Alexander said with a laugh. "It was a very significant day in history."

Musician lovers will argue for more reasons than one. Alexander was named after the famous British WWII Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Over the years, the former Jamaica College student has led his own charge, commanding a mini-army of artistic ideas in a global march to spread joy through music. He refuses to be bogged down by boundaries - musically and otherwise.

"I don't really live in a place," he said of his travels. "I live in a place of thinking. I try to live in a town called healthy attitude.

"That's what I do," he added. "I'm a travelling minstrel."

Yet Alexander still longs for Jamaica. New York serves as a hub for his travels. His busy schedule keeps him away from the island. The last time he visited was to play at the Jazz and Blues Festival in 2010.

These days Alexander fondly remembers "mango trees," lush, rolling hills and "rocking chairs" on countryside verandahs. But waxing nostalgic doesn't mean he is ready to stop, or even slow down - not even after 50 years. His "real best friends are musicians," he explained, and the art remains intoxicating.

"I will play 'til the curtain drops," said Alexander, pointing to the success of veterans such as Ranglin, now in his late '70s, and 90-year-old American jazz pianist Dave Brubeck. "I don't think about stopping."

The only worry is keeping his audience happy. He wants to pamper them with every song.

"I try to do that when I play," said Alexander.

"Dig deep down in your soul to make every note touch people."