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The producers and Renaud, however, repeatedly ask him to play something else, a “medium-type tune.” Monk abides. There is a random beauty in the recording, capturing the details of Monk’s face, his dancing feet, the twirling fingers on the piano. With the melodies swelling and falling, everyone in the background fades out, the agitated talking of the crew in the background becoming merely a low-key nuisance. He creates an uneasy feeling, a repetitiveness to the circus that Monk has to go through.īut in those moments, when Monk isn’t verbally grilled by Renaud, there is the beauty of music, the language in which Monk expresses himself best. Gomis emphasises the uneasiness of the interview with harsh cuts, artificial breathing and rowdy noise dissonances.

The initial spark is another victimising question, asking whether Monk was too “avant-garde” for early 50s French audiences, that leads to his recollection of being provided with no musicians and less money than everyone else. The words spoken don’t fit the narrative. Then the one situation where Monk does speak up and shares something gets an “I think it's best if we erase it” by Renaud. Monk, remaining ever taciturn, stares away as the interview is basically being conducted without him. Presumably, it is of little interest to the jazz fan why Monk kept his piano in the kitchen in New York (all the other rooms were too small), or what he can tell him about Nellie (she is his wife and the mother of his kids). It is Renaud, descending into long monologues, often involving him and his prior encounters that try to dominate the story. It isn’t the musician talking about his relationship to music, his career or his influences. But “Jazz Portrait” and Renaud are less interested in striking up a conversation with the artist than in painting him in rather trivial colours and showering that with unnecessary personal side snippets. There is certainly knowledge and admiration for Monk’s work buried somewhere beneath the surface.

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Renaud, no professional journalist himself, sets out with the misguided mission to create a persona. This observation paves the way for the circus awaiting him at the interview recording. A trip to a bar and the petting of a dog solidify the idea that Monk isn’t a man of many words. The initial moment shows a happily chatting Nellie and Monk predominantly smoking quietly in the background. Gomis begins the arrangement of the footage with Thelonious Monk and his wife Nellie arriving in Paris. Monk, a talented but tragically misunderstood artist, Renaud is trying to convey to the audience. His face will be covered completely in sweat later on, and one can only guess how many hours he had spent under the bright studio lights playing the piano, with no make-up artist close by that could powder his face in the right shade. Monk is sitting next to him at the piano, staring uneasily due to his incomprehension of French, and smiling a polite smile. It’s not revolutionary, but Rewind, Replay, Rebound doesn’t sound like Volbeat’s last day under the sun in the slightest.“Thelonious Monk wrote this piece at the start of the 1940s, but he had to wait until 1958 to become famous among jazz lovers.” It is an obvious narrative, that jazz pianist and host of the programme “Jazz Portrait,” Henri Renaud, is creating.

It’s hard to argue with their light touch: comical track titles such as Pelvis on Fire tell you all you need to know about how seriously Volbeat take themselves, while the album’s guest list – Slayer guitarist Gary Holt, Clutch vocalist Neil Fallon and the Harlem Gospel Choir – speaks to their eclectic nature. There are splashes of sax and 1950s piano on the furiously fun Die to Live, while acoustic ballad When We Were Kids showcases their more tender side.

Fist-pumping guitar riots such as Sorry Sack of Bones find them doing little to disrupt the formula that gave them such success, reaching instead for more face-melting guitar solos, huge pop hooks and Metallica-indebted vocal wails. It’s a sound that’s made them a rock institution in their homeland: last year, they played to 48,000 people in Copenhagen’s Telia Parken, the nation’s biggest ever headline show by a native band.