Whatever musical trend he addresses, Polish jazz star pianist Marcin Masecki never makes what you would expect out of it. After more than a decade of surprises, he now turns up with an album that is perhaps the closest he has ever come to a traditional jazz record: with his trio and also in solo, he paints his own portrait of one of the greatest eccentrics in jazz history, Thelonious Monk.

Marcin Masecki first encountered Thelonious Monk’s music as a teenager, while studying classical music. “Everyone at music school told me at the time that this guy was impossible and couldn’t play a single note correctly on the piano. But what I heard touched me deeply inside. As a classical pianist, you often feel pressured to play lyrically and poetically. But Monk saw the piano as a percussion instrument,” recalls Masecki, who was born in 1982, the year Monk died. Thelonious Monk is one of the most unconventional artists in the history of jazz, who defied all expectations and created a rather introspective branch of bebop, instead of playing standards or technically virtuosic pieces. He had to wait a long time for the recognition he deserved, but in the last decades of his life he was invited to the studio with John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and his compositions became an integral part of the jazz repertoire. The time has now come for Marcin Masecki to really immerse himself in Monk’s work – in a monkish way, as instead of a traditional piano trio, he decided to record the album with two young colleagues, alto saxophonist/clarinetist Eldar Tsalikov and drummer Jan Pieniążek. The recording was made without a set list, the musicians selected the eight compositions for the album during studio sessions, and Masecki also added three solo piano arrangements. “It was Monk who showed me how to follow my own voice without worrying about what was required of me technically. For him, it’s always just about the feeling,” concludes Masecki.

For more than a decade of uninterrupted activity, Masecki has targeted each of his projects at a welldefined area of music in the broad sense, to create something strikingly unusual. In his solo programme Bolero Y Mas, he lets Latin-American music flow through the filters of a classical and jazz pianist; with Piotr Orzechowski he has reimagined Bach on two electric pianos; and with his first jazz ensemble, Pofesjonalizm, he has arranged pieces by Chopin. On his albums Bob and John, he ventured into the realm of lo-fi with an upright piano, and scored Mozart’s infamous canon full of dirty jokes for two pianos and brass as a contemporary chamber music piece. On his previous BMC Records album (Ragtime, 2018), Masecki held up a distorting mirror to the ragtime genre in a duo with drummer Jerzy Rogiewicz. Beyond their headstrong attitude and eccentric experiments, here’s another link between Masecki and Monk: ragtime was the first musical phenomenon that drew Masecki’s attention to jazz as a child, and the young Monk also started out from its improvisational extension, the stride tradition.