“THELONIOUS Monk is not only our greatest genius, no-one else is even close.”

Thus declares guitarist Richard Royall “Duck” Baker in the sleeve notes of his album Duck Baker Plays Monk, a powerfully original and intriguing interpretation of the pianist’s music.

Baker was born in Washington DC in 1949, the son of an Episcopalian minister and a housewife who played piano for her enjoyment.

“As a teenager liked Rock and RnB music,” he tells me. “My big favourite was Ray Charles. I started guitar when I was 14 and was soon playing in a rock band, and also seriously fingerpicking folk and blues.

“We fledgling rockers felt that jazz was over our heads. I was more into blues, until I decided to try Monk as a 16-year-old. I didn’t understand a note of it, but just loved it!”

By the late 1950s the family was living in Richmond, Virginia. “It was the former capital of the Confederacy. I grew up in a segregated racist environment, not including my immediate family, but most people, including almost all the kids I knew.

“I realised at 13 that this was all wrong. Certainly the protest songs of Bob Dylan and others affected me greatly, as did the attitudes of the college kids I was meeting in local coffee houses.

“I hated school and didn’t want to go to university. My first jobs were all manual — in factories and construction sites. I worked up to being a carpenter and made a bit of extra money playing in local rock and blues bands. I expanded to ragtime and early jazz tunes and was developing an approach to free jazz.

“My political education was provided by Uncle Sam when I was a draft resister during the Vietnam war, eventually moving to Canada for a year. We were old enough to be cannon fodder before we were old enough to vote.

“Many of the 1960s folkies were real lefties, as were most of the free jazzers. Archie Shepp was a huge favourite and I agreed 100 per cent with what he said about his music being folk music.

“Jazz was created for and by the African-American community and was always political by its very nature. But black and white folk music were never segregated, especially not in the South.

“I hear the same cry in Ornette Coleman that I hear in an Appalachian singer like Roscoe Holcomb. That idea of always being a folk musician and all of it being a political act was central to my approach.

“I moved with my wife and daughter to San Francisco in 1973, also playing bluegrass, trad and swing jazz. In 1974 I signed with Kicking Mule Records and started touring as a soloist.”

I ask him about his attachment to Monk. “He reached me in an immediate way, like Ray Charles. It seemed very deep and direct and his playing had a rawness to it like that I loved in real blues, like Robert Johnson and Doc Watson. 

“Fingerpickers like me keep an independent bass line under the melody, and applying this to Monk is a different starting place. I loved the wry humour in his tunes, the way he added a dash of bitter to the sweet standards, and his sparer voicings, more than most jazz pianists, is a big plus for guitarists.”

What other jazz musicians have made their own brilliance out of Monk? 

“The influence of Steve Lacy, the great soprano saxophonist, is all over my record especially in the single note playing. And trombonist Roswell Rudd opened up some of Monk’s mysteries to me. But Monk has influenced almost every modern musician I love, and they all do different things with his compositions.”

Which Monk tune on his album gave him most challenges? 

“Off Minor is so far out! Its first chord change is from Mars, goes off to Jupiter in the B section — and keeping the bass line going on Bemsha Swing and developing the melody over it was a big challenge too.”

What is his relationship with Britain? 

“I lived in London from 1978-82 because I was getting more work in Europe than Stateside. I moved back to England in 2003 because the USA had gotten so insane. I’d gotten into British free musicians like Evan Parker and Derek Bailey in the 1970s. But the music I listened to most often was traditional Irish and the great Irish players near where I lived in Fulham.”

I told him how when I was teaching in east London in the early 1970s, John Stevens and Trevor Watts had visited our school and had taught the 12-year-old students Blue Monk while I was teaching poetry in the classroom next door. All together, they blew and tapped it out beautifully. Wasn’t there a brilliantly childlike quality of wisdom and simplicity in Monk’s music, like Blake’s Songs of Innocence?

“I never thought of it in that way, but I like the comparison,” he replies. “Monk appeals to many people who can’t get on with other forms of music. I think Blake would have loved him too.”

Duck Baker plays Monk is released by Fulica Records.