The best are the Monk ballads “Ugly Beauty” and “Crepuscule With Nellie”: slow and distorted, filthy and graceful. Lewis floods the music with swing and volume-pedal ministrations.
Lewis likes Larry Young, the organist who pushed against the standard clichés of jazz organ playing in the 1960s and ’70s, and the spirit of both these albums might have come out of a version of “Monk’s Dream” from Young’s 1965 album “Unity.” But it hasn’t been done a lot, and Mr.
Part 2 of the idea, called “Organ Monk: Uwo in the Black,” with Nasheet Waits on drums instead, has just come out. Two years ago he released “Organ Monk” on his own label, with Cindy Blackman on drums. He plays in a quartet with tenor saxophone, guitar and drums. The New York-area organist Greg Lewis has made a recent project out of transferring Thelonious Monk’s repertory to the Hammond C3 organ. One could do it digitally, feeding Monk’s music through the right tools, but an organ player can do it in real time by keeping the keys pressed down. Thelonious Monk’s sense of harmony was so fresh and savory that it would be nice to have individual moments of it frozen, expanded and prolonged, just to let the sounds get deeper in the ear, to let those mixed colors intensify and explode.
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