On October 16 and again on October 18, 2024, at the Jazz Gallery in New York, guitarist Miles Okazaki presented a solo performance of the entire songbook of Thelonious Monk, which was filmed by Frank Heath and produced by David Breskin. The film, Monkathon, and related materials about this prodigious project will be available free to the public in perpetuity at monkathon.com on Monk’s 109th birthday, October 10, 2026. Also on that date, Okazaki will reissue his 2018 six-disc solo album of Monk’s songbook, Work—unavailable since the sellout of the original printing—on CD on the Cygnus Recordings label.
Miles Okazaki
Monkathon (a film from filmmaker Frank Heath and producer David Breskin)
A review
In 2017, because he is a good kind of crazy, Miles Okazaki decided to make a solo recording of the entire songbook of Thelonious Monk. No musician had ever done that before. A daunting enough project for any pianist—except that Okazaki is a guitarist, which multiplies the difficulties. Through passionately disciplined research and woodshedding, Okazaki scaled the mountain of idiosyncratic material left for us by Monk, and in 2018, he released Work, his prodigious solo recording of the 70 compositions that make up the Monk songbook. It’s a valuable and monumental document of both Thelonious Monk’s compositional genius and Okazaki’s artistry, and it garnered some solo gigs for Okazaki—such as the one at SFJAZZ on October 8, 2002, where producer and writer David Breskin and his wife, Isabel, were in the audience. Isabel, who seems to be a good kind of crazy, too, came up with the idea of presenting a live performance of the songbook and filming it.
Breskin floated the idea to Okazaki, who asked for a year to practice before he came to a decision. He decided it was worth the effort, and a call was made to filmmaker Frank Heath, who agreed to take it on and pulled in primo sound man Joseph Branciforte and the rest of the team. The Jazz Gallery agreed to host the full concert, four more or less chronologically ordered sets running over five hours, on two nights. Menwhile, Okazaki put the same passionate discipline into his preparations for running the New York City Marathon, which he ran—and for the first time completed—two weeks after the concerts, in October 2024.
Armed with his 1940 Gibson ES-150 guitar and EH-150 amp, Okazaki keeps the melodies, harmonies, time signatures, and forms of the tunes intact, allowing himself greater freedom rhythmically, but even though these structures are respected, they nevertheless pass through the lens of Okazaki’s musical invention, his arrangements reflecting his own singularly vivid vocabulary.
The six years of working with Monk’s material since releasing Work polished Okazaki’s performance of the tunes—for example, “Epistrophy.” Keeping the song’s two lines going simultaneously on piano—no problem. But on guitar? Things start out well on Work, but toward the end, “the train falls off the rails,” as Okazaki says in the album’s liner notes. The performance in Monkathon, though, stays firmly on the rails.
The concert’s five hours are spangled with highlights. There’s the fairy dust Okazaki sprinkles on “Pannonica,” Monk’s tribute to his devoted supporter Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica “Nica” de Koenigswarter (née Rothschild); the tenderness of “Ask Me Now;” the renovation of “Green Chimneys;” the illumination of Monk’s humanity on “Monk’s Mood;” the gnarly attitude of “Criss Cross;” the reflective mood of “Ugly Beauty;” the deeply dug blues of “Bolivar Blues,” and much more.
The film itself, beautifully lit by Jonathan Stevens, provides an intimate and instructive concert experience. Heath’s editing of the reams of material collected by his five cameras is informed by and itself informs the music and captures Okazaki’s intensity as well as his deft fretboard work. The film can be viewed straight through or in pieces, and it is easy to pull up any one song you might want to hear. Also included are a short documentary about the making of the film, representative pages from Okazaki’s notebooks, his “Origin Story” of the project, a photo gallery, and a link to the reissued Work album.
Okazaki, Heath, and Breskin have delivered what I expect will be an enduring testament to Monk’s extraordinary gift to the world and Okazaki’s artistic dedication and originality.
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© 2026 Mel Minter