It’s Monk’s time

Don’t get pianist Rick Roe started on the subject of his favorite musician and composer, Thelonious Monk, unless you’re ready for an instant and intensive lesson in music, psychology, philosophy and life in general.

So, let’s get him started.

“One of the amazing things Monk said is, ‘Every time I sit down at the piano, I find something,’” Roe said.

The same could be said for Roe, who surprises himself every time he improvises, finding butterflies and bee stings in every brilliant corner of the keyboard.

Roe is spending the week teaching, rehearsing and touring with Michigan State University jazz students, concluding in a grand finale concert packed with Monk’s spiky, swinging music Friday night (Feb. 14) at Murray Hall.

Monk’s musical sphere is unique, born of jazz yet beyond it, endlessly challenging to musicians yet instantly appealing to people who don’t play, or listen, to jazz.

Few musicians have absorbed Monk’s ugly beauty and complicated simplicity as thoroughly as Roe has. He can tell you all about the major seventh interval, the tritone and other recurring Monk-isms, but that’s not the heart of the matter.

One of Monk’s albums is called “It’s Monk’s Time.” Roe savored the double meaning.

“It’s beyond just knowing the ingredients,” he said. “It’s a feeling. It’s not just harmony and dissonance. It’s his time. That’s one of the things I’ll say to the students: ‘Can that swing anything like him?’ Because if it does, now you’re in a whole other place with the power of the music.”

Roe is no clone of Monk, nor does he want to turn a student into one. It’s Monk’s spirit, his deeply personal quest, that Roe hopes to tap into as he and the students tackle some of the freshest tunes ever written.

“You look at Monk and think, ‘Who could be more brave?’” Roe said. “He’s a link between early jazz, stride piano, to bebop and the avant-garde. He’s not in any category.”

Roe is steeped in jazz history, but his passion and knowledge bounce lightly off the keyboard.

Growing up in Ann Arbor, he started playing piano at about age 4, for exactly the right reason: It was fun.
“I just started improvising,” he said. “I didn’t really like to learn to read music, play what’s on the page, because I didn’t find it that interesting.”

His mom, a jazz singer and teacher, and his dad, an opera singer, encouraged him and made sure the house was full of music. When he was 12, a piano teacher at Community High School in Ann Arbor added some meat to his jazz background.

“He hipped me to the theory,” Roe said. “I thought, ‘Wow, it’s like painters learning the colors and how they’re made.’”

He studies the jazz greats like a Talmudic scholar, but he still follows saxophonist Charlie Parker’s advice to “learn all you can, then throw it away and play.”

In the concert heyday of the student-run Eclipse organization at the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor Jazz and Blues Festival, Roe soaked up the great jazz musicians of the 1970s in person, from Ella Fitzgerald to Ray Charles, Sun Ra and Charles Mingus.

Barely in his 20s, he played heady gigs with great drummers like Detroit’s Roy Brooks and MSU Professor Randy Gelispie at long-lost venues like the Del Rio bar.

“Coming up at an early age, I got to play with some really great musicians, and I got to experience what deep swing feels like,” Roe said. “They have so much love for the swing that it becomes really personal, really amazing when the band connects with the beat. It’s like flying.”

In 1981, he left Ann Arbor to finish high school in Los Angeles and study jazz at the University of Southern California, where his father taught. When plugged-in fusion began to dominate the Southern California jazz scene, Roe returned to the more bop-friendly terrain of Michigan, especially Detroit.

Never big on self-promotion, Roe poured his passion into the piano, performing and patching together teaching gigs at MSU, U of M and several universities and schools in the Western states. He became the house pianist for the now-defunct Bird of Paradise in Ann Arbor and regularly played at the Firefly Club and the Gandy Dancer.

Roe doesn’t go in for showmanship, but audiences instantly connect with his soul-deep enthusiasm, often expressed with uninhibited body language at the keyboard. His shoes might not be the sharpest, but he’s well established as a musician’s musician whose bandmates and peers cherish him for his unquenchable passion, fine ear and childlike wonderment. (Wynton Marsalis, on a visit to Ann Arbor, deemed him a “motherfucker.”) He took first place in the Great American Jazz Piano Competition in 1994 and was a semifinalist in the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz’s International Piano competitions in 1993 and 1999. His 1994 album, “Monk’s Modern Music,” is considered by many to be an original jazz classic in a crowded and largely superfluous field of Monk tribute records.

Now living in Saline, Roe is a regular at the Kerrytown Concert House, the Blue LLama and the Earle.

When he does make a record, he makes it count. “Swing Theory,” a 2013 trio album with bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Karriem Riggins, delighted critics and listeners.

Only last month, “Tribute,” a trio album devoted to the compositions of Lansing composer and jazz patron Gregg Hill, climbed to single-digit spots on national charts and is still rising.

The chance to dive into Hill’s fresh music with longtime colleagues Hurst on bass and Nate Winn on drums hit Roe’s sweet spot, but he also loves to play for live audiences, even if the venue isn’t a strict listening room.

“I like to have fun, even if it’s background music and we’re not supposed to be playing too loud,” he said. “It’s like being a surfer. You can’t always determine where those waves are coming from, or when, but when you get into it, you get a lift from that energy, that beat. You become more awake and energized.”