Carlos Henriquez - Monk Con Clave (2026)

Count to four, then try counting to three at the same time. The tension between those two pulses is close to what clave feels like: two wooden sticks striking each other in a repeating two-bar pattern that anchors and governs everything around it, the rhythmic spine of Afro-Caribbean music. Thelonious Monk never played clave, but his rhythmic language shares something with it — the same stubborn asymmetry, the same insistence on leaning into the beat at unexpected angles. Carlos Henriquez heard that connection, and Monk con Clave is what he built from it.

Henriquez has been garnering serious critical attention for years, recognized as a master of Latin jazz, and this album will only add to that reputation. The band is tight, and completely assured — so much so that if Monk’s name weren’t on the cover you might not immediately know his music was part of the inspiration. But out of that precision something looser and wilder keeps emerging — soloists who play like they’ve been waiting all night for their moment, and Anthony Almonte and Jeremy Bosch singing with a passion that none of it prepares you for.

“Round Midnight” opens with blasting horns and that sharp, cracking clave percussion, Gonzalo Rubalcaba at the piano — fluid and swinging one moment, percussive and choppy the next — while flutes and brass trade phrases overhead. “I Mean You” gets the band swinging hard before a gutsy baritone sax solo gives way to the trumpeter, who sounds entirely comfortable blasting flurries of notes into the upper register. “El Son De Teo,” a slow-burn Son atmosphere built in homage to producer Teo Macero, belongs to Almonte, whose singing has an expressive richness that pulls you in and doesn’t let go.

Threading together Monk’s “Evidence” and “Four in One” as though they were always a single composition, “Evidence of Four and One” opens with jagged rhythms and brass alternating with percussion in a way that sounds like two songs playing simultaneously. The piano hangs playful little phrases in the upper register before the intensity builds, a trombone solo steps forward, and then a baritone sax arrives playing a groove so relaxed it stops the track cold — until the full band comes screaming back.

The emotional center of the album is “San Juan Hill,” Henriquez’s own composition reflecting on the displacement of Black American and Puerto Rican communities during the Robert Moses era, when the neighborhood that shaped Monk was erased to build Lincoln Center. It hits hard from the first note — full band, vocals right up front, percussion driving through shifting time signatures. A piano solo emerges, choppy, melodic, Monkish with a Latin twist, before the trumpeter takes over, double-tonguing crystal clear high notes that cut right through everything. “Plena Azul Blue Monk” closes things in Puerto Rican plena tradition, trombone carrying Monk’s melody in clipped, jagged phrases before the vocals arrive and the whole band swings it home.

Monk and clave, it turns out, were always pulling in the same direction. It just took Carlos Henriquez to show us where that was.

Carlos Henriquez – bass, bandleader; Obed Calvaire – drums; Bobby Allende – bongoes; Pedrito Martínez – percussion; Jesus Ricardo, Mike Rodriguez, Kali Rodriguez, Nathaniel Williford – trumpet; Marshall Gilkes, Elliot Mason, Dion Tucker – trombone; Sherman Irby, Ted Nash – alto sax; Chris Lewis, Abdias Armentero – tenor sax; Paul Nedzela – baritone sax GUESTS: Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Osmany Paredes, Robert Rodriguez – piano; Pedrito Martinez – congas, vocals; Anthony Almonte – vocals; Jeremy Bosch – flute, vocals