Martel Chapman’s Hats and Beards greets me like a memory I never fully put down. Its fractured geometry, its layered bodies, its sense of overlapping presence all of it feels like an echo of the late-night jazz that formed me. Chapman, whose visual idiom draws deeply from jazz culture, paints in the language of syncopation. His figures bend and repeat, not in chaos, but in something closer to improvisational order. They look like they are in mid-riff, caught between a downbeat and the next idea. And when I sit with this painting, the soundtrack is immediate: Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” begins to swing somewhere in the back of my mind.
As a teenager, I used to fall asleep each night with Bob Parlocha’s voice drifting through the dark. His radio show, equal parts companionship and education, became my first conservatory. Parlocha played jazz like he loved the world and wanted the world to love it back. He offered Stan Getz beside Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman beside Jimmy Giuffre, and then—without warning—he would drop Monk. That shift always startled me. Clarinet jazz, with its round vowels and mellow precision, felt like a language I thought I understood. Monk felt like a language still inventing itself.
The clarinet was my first love. To me, it remains the perfect jazz instrument: flexible, intuitive, emotionally articulate. It can bend like a question or cut like an argument. Even now, the timbre of a good clarinet line feels like home. In Goodman’s bright sparkle or Giuffre’s dusky lyricism, I hear a kind of clarity, a way of knowing the world through breath and reed. Psychologically, it reflects the kind of internal order that always appealed to me: a structured freedom, a fluid line that still respects the edge of the staff. The clarinet, for me, was the instrument of coherence.
But Monk has never allowed me to stay coherent for long.
Monk disrupts. He refracts the melody, fractures the harmony, and brings dissonance into a kind of spiritual visibility. Art historian Kellner once wrote that Cubism “makes room for the unseen by revealing the angles of perception," and Monk does precisely that. He makes room not for the note we expect, but for the note that remakes expectation. His music nudges me out of the clarity the clarinet taught me to seek. It forces me to inhabit the liminal, the unresolved, the beautifully unsteady.
Chapman captures that unsteadiness with remarkable fidelity. His figures layer across one another like overlapping takes, like a soloist recorded at different moments and played back simultaneously. There is no single line to follow, no singular identity to fix upon. Each hat and beard becomes a fragment of a larger presence. They lean forward, hands extended, as if searching for the next chord. The painting feels like a visualization of what Monk scholars often describe as his “angularity." A term used both in music theory and in psychological readings of modern creativity (Watkins, 2011). It is angularity as personality, as ontology, as method.
When I look closely at the hands in the painting—proliferating, reaching, overlapping—I think of the way Parlocha used to introduce a complex tune. He never apologized for the challenge; he simply trusted the listener to meet the music where it was. He invited us into difficulty with generosity. Through him, I learned that jazz is both a welcoming and a destabilizing art form. It teaches us, if we let it, that ambiguity is not an obstacle but a method of truth.
Hats and Beards reminds me of that lesson. These fractured musicians seem to suggest that identity itself is improvisational. That we are all composed of earlier takes, earlier versions of ourselves layered into a single moment. And like any good ensemble, those layers do not always agree. They collide, overlap, and sometimes resolve only at the last possible beat.
When Monk plays “Straight, No Chaser,” the tune walks forward with such confident swing that you almost miss the corners he cuts. But those corners are where the soul of the piece lives. Monk reminds the world that music does not have to be pretty; it has to be true. Chapman, in his own idiom, does the same. His painting does not smooth out the complexity of jazz culture, it multiplies it.
Tonight, sitting with this image, I can almost hear Parlocha saying, as he often did, “Listen closely…there’s something beautiful happening here.” And he was right. There always is. Jazz remains one of my earliest teachers of attention, of patience, of ambiguity. Monk still challenges the parts of me that want the clean line of a clarinet phrase. And Chapman’s work meets me in that exact tension: between coherence and rupture, between melody and interruption, between who I was in those darkened teenage rooms and who I am now.
And through it all, the music keeps playing. Straight, no chaser.