It was bound to happen. On its first six albums, the أحمد [Ahmed] quartet – British singular pianist Pat Thomas and alto sax player Seymour Wright, Swedish double bass player Joel Grip, and French drummer Antonin Gerbal, reimagined the music of innovative American double bass player Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who was a key member in Thelonious Monk quartets in the late fifties, and took part in Monk’s seminal albums – Misterioso, Thelonious in Action, with Johnny Griffin (Riverside, 1058, 1959), and At Carangie Hall, with John Coltrane (Blue Note, 1975).
Over several decades, the four musicians of أحمد [Ahmed] have engaged with Monk’s standards in various individual and collective ways. But the double album, Play Monk, is the first album documenting أحمد [Ahmed]’s versions of Monk’s music, which began with a spontaneous interpretation of «Evidence» in Novara, Italy, in 2023.
Play Monk offers أحمد [Ahmed]’s extended treatments for Monk’s five iconic pieces – «Bye-Ya», «Epistroph», «Friday Thirteenth», «Round Midnight», «Evidence», and «Oska T», packed into dense 130 minutes. It was recorded at Fish Factory Studios in London in March 2026, on the same three-day session أحمد [Ahmed] recorded Sama’a (Audition) (OTORoku, 2025). The cover photo is of Monk at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco in 1968, taken by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.
أحمد [Ahmed] follows Abdul-Malik’s unique conception of time, always challenging its linear trajectory and offering sites and modes of synthesis and rupture instead. The quartet dissects and reconstructs each of Monk’s concise themes as an epic, dense series of fragmented, cyclical, colliding, and dance-like repetitive-rhythmic elements, even the ballad «Round Midnight», with no solos, but is totally possessed within the intense and almost manic rhythmic storms. أحمد [Ahmed] exposes hidden rhythmic logics and patiently gravitates these standards into hypnotic statements that are faithful to Monk’s elusive qualities, as well as those of أحمد [Ahmed]. The original melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and spatial gestures become complex vernacular forms, corresponding with the musical universes of Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Caribbean diasporic music, European improvisation, and Jamaican reggae-dub sound system operator Jah Shaka in their pursuit of future, free music.
The music of أحمد [Ahmed] has its unique accumulative effect, and you can do nothing but surrender fully to its powerful, imaginative flow and rhythms. Play Monk will make you move, smile, and most likely dance, just like Monk used to dance in circles while playing. This album promises that Monk’s music is still relevant, inventive, and inspiring.
Eyal Hareuveni
Pat Thomas (piano), Joel Grip (double bass), Antonin Gerbal (drums), Seymour Wright (alto saxophone)
