Mike Monford: From Detroit With Love

By Philip Freeman I Sep. 24, 2024

“When I heard Jackie McLean, it was like the perfect mixture of bebop or hard-bop, but also some edge,” says Monford.
(Photo: Chris Drukker)

It’s tough to rank jazz’s most important cities, but the top centers of activity have to include Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York.

Detroit in particular has produced such a stunning array of top-level jazz players that there’s an entire book devoted to the subject.

Saxophonist Mike Monford grew up a hip-hop kid in the Motor City, picking up the horn as a teenager. He always had wide-ranging tastes. “I found myself loving bebop and swing and all of that,” he said, “but I [also] loved what they called at that time avant-garde or free-jazz or the New Thing.”

Then he discovered one musician who seemed to be at the center of all these sounds. “When I heard Jackie McLean, it was like the perfect mixture of bebop or hard-bop, but also some edge … and when I found out that I could study with him, I zeroed in on it.”

Monford worked with local heroes like trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, reeds player and Tribe Records co-founder Wendell Harrison, keyboardist and Strata Records leader Kenny Cox, drummer Roy Brooks and others, and eventually traveled to Connecticut to study with McLean at the Hartt School of Music. From there, he was off to New York, where he spent two decades working with bassist/composer Bill Lee, pianist Marc Cary and many others. Eventually, though, he returned home.

“I moved back to Detroit … during the emergency city manager period, when the city was bankrupt,” Monford says. “There were no streetlights, there was no ambulance … no school system. So just a lot of turmoil, and people were just kind of beat up and battle-weary.”

To counter that, he began to seek out musicians who were interested in rebuilding and revitalizing the city through art. He created a multigenerational ensemble called Detroit Effervescence to make music that combined jazz, hip-hop and soul.

Monford doesn’t like to describe his music with genre tags like “spiritual jazz” or “avant-garde”; instead, he calls it Afrofuturism, which puts it into a continuum that includes the Sun Ra Arkestra, Parliament/Funkadelic, Burnt Sugar, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Miles Davis’ electric bands and more. “So it’s like the best of the past,” he said. “And then we’re pushing forward with the future.”

The group played around Detroit, building a strong local following, but also traveled to Washington, D.C., and even to Europe. Meanwhile, Monford was touring with the French vocal duo Les Nubians and teaching at Chandler Park Academy; sometimes, the school’s concert band would open Detroit Effervescence gigs. After several years of performances, he put together a version of the group for a residency at Cliff Bell’s, a legendary Detroit venue that first opened its doors in 1935. Monford’s new album The Cloth I’m Cut From features five extended live tracks performed by an ensemble that includes trumpet player Allen Dennard, tenor saxophonist Calvin Taylor, keyboardists Pamela Wise and William Hill, violinists Bebe Sewell and Xavier Gillium, bassist Jaribu Shahid, drummer Tariq Gardner, percussionist Kevin Jones and MC Napi Devi. Some players are in their 60s, while others are students of Monford’s.

The album includes two original compositions, “Jah Jah” and “Piercing Eyes,” and versions of Lee Morgan’s “Exotique,” Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away” and McLean’s “Jack’s Tune,” rendered here as one word: “Jackstune.”

The Morgan tune is a nod to his parents, both of whom were Philadelphia natives. The Lincoln piece holds great meaning for Monford; one of his daughters is named for her. And the McLean piece connects to his time as a student, but on the album, Monford uses it as a generational bridge much the way the older man bridged bebop and the avant-garde and continued to progress throughout his career. Napi Devi delivers a heartfelt hip-hop verse in the middle of the piece. “I wanted to pay homage to Jackie’s innovations and take his tune somewhere else [into] the 2000s. So that’s how that layer of cloth got on the album.”

The Cloth I’m Cut From comes wrapped in a beautiful cover painting by Chicago-based artist Tracy Crump, featuring Monford in profile, holding his horn and surrounded by abstract, floating lines and spheres. The record took several years to produce, partly because the pandemic shut down studios and nightclubs and partly because life got in the way. Monford is a husband and father, after all, with both professional and familial responsibilities. Eventually, though, it all came together with money saved from gigs and some donations from the community, and the residency at Cliff Bell’s, which allowed him to capture the music without paying for studio time.

“When the industry changed and almost went completely independent,” Monford says, “artists had to become booking agents, managers, A&R, everything that a record company would have. So it takes longer, unless you have the capital already. That’s the reality. So if I could tell any independent artist [anything] … definitely be patient and don’t give up. When a project isn’t going anywhere for a year or two, that’s when you can let it go and you’ll lose it. You just want to dig in. You put it on hold for however long you have to, and then you get back to it.”

As a bandleader, a teacher, a parent and a community activist, Monford is in the uplift business. Detroit has decades of jazz history to its credit, but it’s people like Monford, who recognize that leadership and encouragement are just as important as musical talent, who ensure that it will continue to move forward, innovate and grow. DB