The full ensemble arrives in force for Monk's blues, producing the concert's most expansive performance with forty-five combined solo choruses across four players. Lefkowitz-Brown delivers a marathon twenty-two-chorus tenor saxophone solo — the longest individual statement of the evening — while Brecker contributes nine choruses on trumpet, Cohen adds seven on piano, and Nakamura takes seven on acoustic bass. At 192 BPM over the twelve-bar blues form, the thirteen-minute performance captures the intergenerational dynamic at the heart of this concert: Brecker's veteran authority alongside Lefkowitz-Brown's youthful stamina, with Cohen and Nakamura fueling both. Monk wrote Straight, No Chaser in the 1940s, and its immediately recognizable angular melody has made it one of jazz's most called blues heads. The sheer volume of improvisation here gives the performance a jam-session intensity that sets the bar for the rest of the evening.
