Mike Monford

The musical and spiritual values of people’s lives come in so many different shapes, sizes and narratives, it’s easy to forget that beauty, meaning and “fulfillingness,” to use the word of Detroit’s great son, Stevie Wonder, can take on many forms. A successful result always requires intention, it needs the application of a studied craft, and a community to provide a musicking feedback loop. But how long the journey toward the result is, or the true definition of “successful,” are in the ear of the beholder.

Imagine, for instance, the beautiful ongoing journey of Mike Monford , a Detroit-based alto saxophonist, band-leader, educator and depositor of sonic history. Actually, imagine numerous, naturally overlapping sonic histories. Because Monford’s life’s experience spans a Motor City hip-hop youth alongside his neighbors (and fellow Pershing High School alumni) J Dilla and Amp Fiddler; mentorship by a wide swath of Detroit’s jazz elders, followed by study with the legendary saxophonist Jackie McLean at Hartford’s Hartt School conservatory; partnership with the great pianist Marc Cary, who played on Monford’s 2012 full-length debut, Perseverance; and a decade of key roles in his hometown’s reassertion of its spiritual, free-jazz, Afrofuturist and Autophysiopsychic (to use a word coined by another of Detroit’s great sons, Yusef Lateef – another Monford teacher) musical tradition.

It seems like Mike Monford is forever both teacher and student. And his long-gestating sophomore album, The Cloth I’m Cut From , what he calls a “musical autobiography,” is a statement about where he came from but also where he’s going. Surrounded by a large multi-generational ensemble of Detroit players — seasoned vets like Griot Galaxy/Arkestra bassist Jaribu Shahid and Tribe keyboardist Pamela Wise, as well as student violinists Bebe Sewell and Xavier Gillium, and young MC Napi Devi — Monford unfurls the title’s biographical tapestry in five thrilling extended performances recorded at the legendary Cliff Bell’s club, in the summer of 2021. Between compositions by legendary figures influential in his life (McLean, Lee Morgan, Abbey Lincoln) and Monford originals inspired by his son (“Jah Jah”) and mother (“Piercing Eyes”), it is flowing, knowing, relaxed open music, heavy on rhythm, melody and emotion, equally indebted to hard-bop and soul-jazz turns, spiritual and Afrofuturist jazz yearnings, all propelled by Afro-Latin percussion. One microcosm of Detroit’s musical community.