Team HarmoniMonk
Michaela Gomez
Guitars – Bright Mississippi and In Walked Bud
Michaela Gomez is a Brooklyn-based guitarist who specializes early blues and jazz. Michaela is known for her fingerstyle and slide guitar playing. She also performs on the lap steel. Michaela works with artists like Lee Taylor, Samoa Wilson, Tamar Korn, Dennis Lichtman, Bill Barrett, and Hazmat Modine. Michaela has enjoyed a longtime collaboration with Randy Weinstein.
George Rush
Basses – Green Chimneys
Tuba – Straight, No Chaser
‘Eclectic’ would be the best way to describe George’s career. Playing basses and tuba, he has covered a lot of ground, from circuses to Balkan brass bands, Lincoln Center to CBGB, on and off Broadway, with Grammy-winning children’s albums in between. Career highlights include work with Lloyd Cole, blues
legend Hubert Sumlin, The Pogues, The Derek Trucks Band, Deborah Harry, Natalie Merchant, Randy Brecker, Ben E. King, Kurt Elling, and MacArthur-grant-winning puppeteer Basil Twist. As a member of the acclaimed Americana group Hem, he has toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe, playing venues
including Boston’s Symphony Hall (Boston Pops) and London’s Southbank Centre. With Hem he has also recorded music for several Shakespeare in the Park productions, notably “Twelfth Night,” as well as music for the Broadway production “Amélie.” Recent work includes the bands of noted jazz tenor Craig Handy (Herbie Hancock) and recording with harmonica virtuoso Randy Weinstein. George is currently performing on bass and tuba in the premiere of “How Long Blues,” directed and choreographed by Twyla Tharp, with music by T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield.
Richard Huntley
Drums, percussion – Off Minor
Pete Smith
Guitars – Ruby, My Dear
Pete Smith is a New York City-based guitarist who performs in a wide range of musical settings. As a founding member of Grupo los Santos (Santos 4tet), a vanguard Afro-Cuban and Brazilian-style quartet, he has played New York’s Town Hall and concerts throughout the U.S., Cuba and Austria. He has performed at the Berlin Jazz Festival and Montreal Jazz Festival, as well as concerts in 30 countries throughout Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has worked with Norah Jones, trumpeter Donald Byrd, Cuban trombone master Juan Pablo Torres, Andrew Hill, Kat Edmonson, Vince Giordano & the Nighthawks, The Moonlighters, Madeleine Peyroux, Natalie Merchant, and Huun-Huur-Tu, and is a member of Michael Feinstein’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. In 2023 he traveled to Congo-Kinshasa as a member of the band Opius Bliss—as cultural ambassadors for the U.S. Embassy—to perform for and teach, play, and dialogue with local musicians in Kinshasa and Kisangani. 2023 also saw the release of Grupo los Santos’s fourth album, Santos 4. Pete will be recording a new album with bassist Sean Smith (The Smith Duo) in 2024.
Randy Weinstein
Harmonicas all over the damn place!!
(de)Arranger for all tunes on HarmoniMonk
I was inspired to play harmonica by my older brother, Arlen, while in high school in Kansas City. For kicks, I noodled around with naive approximations of blues licks and rudimentary takes on Charlie Parker blues heads.
I got serious about blues harp after moving to Chicago in ‘76 to attend college. A chance meeting with blues harp master David Waldman one bright winter day on 51st Street ignited my deep appreciation for Little Walter. It instantly reorganized my priorities in ways I still struggle to fathom.
While in Chicago, I continued to advance my blues harp skills—gigging a bit, sitting in on the South, West, and North sides, but mostly woodshedding and uncovering more unknown unknowns about blues, race relations, and music along the way. Many of Little Walter’s contemporaries—Louis Meyers, Little Willie Anderson, Big Bad Ben, and Big Wheeler to name a handful—were around and had a deep and articulate understanding of Walter’s nonpareil musical genius. They were all inspiring, if not exactly encouraging, of my ambitions.
A job at Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Mart provided a steady immersion in jazz and blues tunes all day long. I also started jazz studies with guitarist David Bloom around ‘82. Bloom focused on the musical practices that enabled one to make a convincing, swinging musical statement.
I moved back to Kansas City in ‘83, and soon started gigging pretty regularly. My mainstay gig was with the Black Crack Revue (BCR), the Midwest’s preeminent “Afro-Nuclear Wave Funk Reggae Swing Tango band.” Inspired by an extended residency of the Sun Ra Arkestra in KC, BCR mixed performance art with avant-garde and dance musics into a distinctive early iteration of “world music.” I also commenced jazz theory studies with the venerable John Elliott, who made me do all the lessons on piano—no mean feat for someone who didn’t tickle the ivories.
In addition to playing with BCR, I gigged with a hand percussion ensemble, various blues and jazz combos, and an Appalachian fiddle group, and sat in a lot. I did some recording sessions, most notably with the great jazz singer Karrin Allyson. A rendition of “Azure-Té” from my first KC session with her, on the 1995 album of the same name, still gets some airplay.
I moved to New York in ‘98 and soon started attending a harmonica salon hosted by the legendary Charlie Leighton. This was a formative experience. William Galison—my hands-down favorite jazz harmonica player—was a regular, as were free-reed luminaries Charles Spranklin, Stan Silverstone, Stan Harper, the Sgro Brothers, Phil Caltabellotta, and Rob Paparozzi.
Wade Schuman—an adept at early acoustic blues harp styles—started Hazmat Modine, a twin-harmonica combo, in ‘98. I served as the cool chromatic foil to Wade’s incendiary diatonic harp forays for around 10 years. I played on Hazmat’s first record, Bahamut.
I was also fortunate to reunite with Karrin on her Grammy-nominated 2011 release ‘Round Midnight. In addition, I played in a couple of other multi-harmonica units, most notably the string band Brooklyn Corn Dodgers with old-time Appalachian and honky-tonk harp master Trip Henderson.
My main gig in the early ‘teens was with Wormwood, led by guitarist Michaela Gomez. Drummer Richard Huntley and bassist/tubaist George Rush rounded out the group, and are featured on this HarmoniMonk Volume 19.
Throughout the first two decades of this century, I kept studying with various people. Most notable were saxophonist Bob Mover and pianist Mike Longo.
The HarmoniMonk project stems directly from the protracted isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Cut off from musical community, I decided to fill in my empty dance card with a deferred hankering to experiment with adapting the music of Thelonious Monk to harmonica, in settings that reflect my own musical tastes and capacities. And then share sonic travel notes of this excursion with the world. Talk about chutzpah!
My aim is to eventually present all 70 Monk compositions through HarmoniMonk transmogrifications. But each rendition takes weeks, and I ain’t young. With Volume 19, I’ve now released 21 Monk tunes. I figure I have decent prospects to make it to the finish line. Fingers crossed….