An Interview with John Guess

Photo of John F. Guess

This interview was recorded on November 20, 2007, in Houston, Texas.

ROWELL: John, I want to start with your career, since you graduated from Johns Hopkins University. Your career is complex; it is packed. When you graduated from Hopkins, you didn't elect to do one simple thing; you did many things. You have managed a mayoral campaign. You have been an international banker in Brazil. You have been a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch. You have been a principal in a South Africa-based firm. You have been a partner in an award winning consulting company. You are on many cultural boards and head the consulting group in a family-owned firm. You have done much. But to begin this interview I want to focus on just one element or one facet of your career; I want to focus on what you're doing now: film production, filmmaking. I want to begin with the film you are creating now: your film on Thelonious Monk.

GUESS: And Jason Moran.

ROWELL: Oh, yes, and Jason Moran. In fact, your working title is "Moran and Monk." What brought you to this subject as a film?

GUESS: Houstonians are notorious for having an image complex thinking that they need to be something or somewhere else, but the reality is that you can see the world here. It is an international city. Anything from immigration to music and arts I figured you could interpret from here. And well, Jason Moran is from here. And since I was targeting people from Houston who had something to say to people nationally and internationally, Jason Moran was an easy choice. I knew Jason's people and I approached Jason. Originally, we were looking at doing a film titled Jason Moran in Paris. But when Jason came to Houston for his brother Tai's wedding in early 2007, I was able to sit down with him. I went into that meeting having looked at his schedule and I said, "Hey, what's this thing with Monk that you're doing at Duke University? Maybe we can do something just about that and that way we're not doing just a concert film and we're not having to travel around to Amsterdam and Paris to do the film but we can do it right here." And he looked at me and said, "That's a good film, because it's part of a year-long honor of Monk celebrating what would have been his ninetieth birthday" and so we agreed to do it. The film is a fascinating story about recently found music from Monk's Town Hall concert in 1959, and about how that music was recreated and then performed by Jason in San Francisco, and then reinterpreted as the piece In My Mind at a world premier at Duke University in late October, 2007. The work was commissioned by Duke University, by the San Francisco Jazz Festival, by the Chicago Symphony Hall, and by the Washington Society for the Performing Arts. I like to tell my Houston stories. It is sort of like my little inside joke, that when you see Moran & Monk, it's not really Houston. But it's a story about a boy from Houston.

ROWELL: When did this meeting take place?

GUESS: Early 2007.

ROWELL: At the Jason Moran concert here in Houston last year?

GUESS: No, this is after the concert. You're talking about the concert based on Adrian Piper, where Jason did an interpretation for the Walker Museum and he did that concert here. So this was maybe in February of 2007. We had been able to begin to start the film in July, in San Francisco, at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. We met with Monk's son, drummer T. S. Monk, who played in the recreation concert there; we met with Robert D. G. Kelly, who is the most renowned authority on Monk, and of course Jason. Randall Kline, the San Francisco Jazz Festival Executive Director, and Joshua Redman who was the...