In With the Old
The performance duo James + Jerome break into podcasting with Piano Tales
When the music and storytelling duo James + Jerome prepared to record their first podcast, their director gave them some advice: “The goal is not to tell the best versions of these stories. The goal is to get an accurate record of the version of the story you happened to tell today.” After years performing their improvisatory, lyrical show Piano Tales for live audiences, the time had come for James Harrison Monaco and Jerome Ellis to enter the studio. But now that they were going on the record, they hesitated.
How would their distinctive method of musical storytelling play outside a live context? Would they have to adjust their dense, associative style to keep easily distracted listeners involved? Would all their thinking about oral tradition and improvisation, and music, and speech in the theater hold up on a podcast? Monaco says they felt like Frodo and Sam entering Mordor, “like we have important work to do here, but we enter with trepidation.”
I first saw James + Jerome perform in a brewery in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn for an audience of maybe fifteen people. Ellis improvised at the upright piano while Monaco told stories on the mic, sharing excerpts from their upcoming performance at the audio festival On Air Fest. Their attitude on stage was more folk musician than performance artist. They called out stories as though they were songs in a repertoire. At one point, the audience was given the option to hear a story about a nun or a story about a pirate. We chose nun.
A few weeks later, I went to Monaco’s apartment in Bed-Stuy to learn more about their work and their new adventures in podcasting. Ellis called in from the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where he was doing an eight-week residency, working on music for a new show and “trying to be very loose with my ideas of what I do.”
The way Monaco, 31, and Ellis, 30, interact in person is consistent with their dynamic on stage. Ellis, who has a stutter, has a presence that is meditative, even-keeled, and considerate — monkish. He’s the foil to Monaco, who speaks with a whirlwind, eccentric-professor style, like he doesn’t think there will be enough time to tell you about everything he needs to tell you. Monaco posits, “Probably even what I think of as slow is fast for most people, as far as storytelling goes.”
The pair both grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia. They had close friends in common, but they didn’t know each other well. It wasn’t until they were attending colleges in New York City that they began to collaborate. At first, it was all music, with Ellis on sax and Monaco on drums. That flopped when Ellis realized Monaco was “not a jazz drummer.” Things worked better when Ellis switched to keyboard, and for the next two years they made not-jazz music together. They attempted to make a play, but it didn’t work out. It involved “too many moving parts” and other things they weren’t interested in, like “people entering and exiting.” “I left that project feeling really despairing,” Monaco told me, “and then that summer, Jerome was in the city, I was in the city, and I started reading the Thousand and One Nights.”
“One Thousand and One Nights is extremely intellectual,” Monaco gushes about the volume of popular tales collected in the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age. “The level of brilliance in it is so high. But it is totally structured to be always entertaining. The whole point is like, what would you have to do to make a listener literally never get bored for all time?” The pair’s fascination with the book resulted in their first full-on piece, They Ran and Ran and Ran, which Monaco describes as an “American suburban” — he cringes — version of One Thousand and One Nights. “We cut out everything but the piano and the mic,” says Monaco. “No movement — just words and piano. It just felt so fertile.” In a 2009 video of the show, Ellis plays at an upright piano while Monaco welcomes the audience in. Monaco asks Ellis to play an interpretation of “how nice these people look and smell.” Ellis pings a high key, plays a triumphant chord, then turns and grins.
After They Ran and Ran and Ran came Aaron/Marie, which has a more involved staging (at one point, Jerome enters!) and a less “suburban” subject matter. Then INK: A Piece for Museums, an “art lecture, live personal essay, and electronic music concert,” which played at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in January, 2019. Throughout, James + Jerome developed and performed Piano Tales, the rotating series of stories and music they’re now transforming into a podcast series.
Their podcast version of Piano Tales hasn’t been released, so I won’t give too much detail, but Episode 1 takes a story from One Thousand And One Nights — the 131st night, specifically — and transforms it into a piano tale. Monaco explains what that means in his intro: “Piano Tales is a project that celebrates pianos, obviously, but also the art of the musical tale. And a tale in our opinion is a story that is specifically made to be told out loud and that is best experienced heard out loud.” You can hear the piano seat creaking as Ellis plays his opening serenade under Monaco’s setup. “And we’ll be more or less faithful to that story as it appears in that book. But at the same time we’re going to be driven by the music of the tale. We’ll be driven by the whim of the moment. And our goal always is to follow the spirit of the tale more than the letter of the tale.”
Ellis credits Piano Tales director Andrew Scoville with the idea of making a podcast. He’s the one who advised them in the studio “to get an accurate record of the version of the story you happened to tell today.” “He’s as integral in it is as we are,” says Ellis, “and talking with him, we’ve really tried embracing the podcast as its own thing. Not trying to necessarily replicate the experience of an audience.”
“Nor are we trying to replicate studio editing,” adds Monaco. “I feel like what we’re trying to replicate is me and Jerome and Andrew Scoville, like, sitting in Jerome’s apartment, snacking and drinking tea, and with the piano nearby, just sharing stories with each other.”
On their website, James + Jerome call their work “hyper-literary.” And their work is full of references to books, stories taken from books, stories about books, and stories about finding stories in books. Monaco suggested their collaboration was really just a “twelve-year book club.” I got the sense that even the ideas not explicitly related to books in their shows would have a whole literary — and likely multilingual — pedigree. Both of them are also translators; Ellis from Portuguese, and Monaco from Italian and Spanish. There was a hefty copy of The Tale of Genji and The Charterhouse of Parma on the coffee table. Cervantes, Dante, Yeats are on a shelf. Walter Benjamin came up at least three times. The Epic of Gilgamesh is on their minds, as are Simone Weil and Roberto Calasso, for their thinking on religion and secular society. W.G. Sebald, Primo Levi, and Elliot Weinberger are heroes. Borges? “Totally. I mean we’ve read almost everything that man ever wrote. And reread most of it,” says Monaco.
But in person, their shows feel, if anything, anti-literary: unburdened by a stable text, music as important as language, authorship largely irrelevant. This has much to do with James + Jerome’s global relationship to oral traditions — Ellis completed a Fulbright in Brazil, where he studied Samba music, poetry, and art history; Monaco spent a semester during college in Ghana, where he studied griot storytellers and musicians. They are influenced by the Blues tradition in the United States, and for their newest piece, The Conversationalists, they’re thinking about Latin American oral/musical traditions like ranchera and bolero. “If musical epic poetry existed today about our world now in a similar way that it did, say, when Homer was writing in, like, the 9th century B.C. or what have you, what would it feel like?” wonders Monaco, “Maybe we’re trying to invent a different American tradition, though we have no acolytes.”
Ellis explains that he holds the oral tradition alive in the Black church the closest. “In a lot of ways, the relationship between the minister and the person playing the organ or piano has a lot in common with what we do […] My grandpa, who is a minister and is turning 100 next month, still gives sermons in a little storefront church in Brooklyn, where James has been. There’s no one playing an instrument when he’s speaking, but he kind of subsumes all that into his own body when he’s speaking. His speaking is really in between speaking and song for me […] And I’ve observed, because I’ve been going to that church ever since I was a baby, that nowadays he sermonizes less and will just tell the story really slowly.”
Monaco, who says he grew up going to a “cool” church and now does a lot of “denomination tourism”, estimates that 30–45% of James + Jerome’s conversation is about religion. “I feel it was a very early bonding point for us […] We were curious about it, the kind of stories that were in it. To me, if you engage with the entire history of storytelling around the world, trying to separate religion from storytelling is a strange abnormality that I think only occurred for like a hundred years in Europe, as an experiment.”
When they want to be grandiose, the duo sees their project as a resistance to the xenophobia and insularity of the narratives Americans are used to hearing. Many of the stories in Piano Tales and their other shows take place outside the United States and center characters who aren’t American. Some take place long before the United States was a thought in anybody’s wigged head. They want to check the engorged sense many of us have of America’s importance in world history. Monaco explains that he’s “suspicious of any story claiming to be American that has no immigrant character. That sounds to me like utter bullshit.” Ellis adds, “There’s always been an unspoken pact behind our work and friendship and just the way we move through the world, which is to resist the dehumanization of people.”
In a 2015 video of Aaron/Marie, Ellis arpeggiates a soft, pulsing synth as Monaco describes how an Iranian shop owner he met on Long Island drew a map for him to explain the history of the Middle East. The man drew, in great detail, the geography of the region and the events that had shaped its past. Then, as an afterthought, he drew a dotted line to the corner of the page, where he scratched out a tiny rectangle: Long Island.
Monaco and Ellis readily admit they don’t know much about the world of podcasting, but they have opinions. Reflecting on their recent performance at On Air Fest in Brooklyn, which bills itself as a festival about “the culture of audio,” they said they’re not convinced the audio elements of their work are why they should be included in that scene, because it’s not really audio they’re interested in per se. Rather, they’re thinking about a set of values of storytelling and oral tradition that they hope transcends mediums. Off the top of their heads those values are:
- Celebration of the imagination/theatre of the mind
- Play
- Variation in each telling
- Meter/rhythm/music/singing
- Not taking authorship too seriously/“versioning” other people’s stories
- Improvisation
- Cities over nations/oral storytelling as a local act/nations are built on text (Benjamin)
“My hope is that, like any great tale demands to be retold from memory, we would make a podcast that might have that quality,” says Monaco.
So why does James + Jerome’s approach to storytelling feel new and refreshing? It could be that it’s just really old — like One Thousand And One Nights old, like Gilgamesh old, like pre-system-of-writing-things-down old. Ellis, who Monaco and I learn has been staring at shapes in a stained glass window throughout the call, reminds us of Socrates’ idea that “when you learn something, you are remembering something you already knew. The newest thing is always the oldest.”
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