At Carnegie Hall Thelonious Monk And John Coltrane Zip

#At Carnegie Hall Thelonious Monk And John Coltrane Zip full#

The recording was then restored by producer Michael Cuscuna and T.S. The tape was stored at the Library of Congress where it sat untouched, until 2005 when it was discovered by recording lab supervisor Larry Appelbaum. The recording, by Voice of America, documents two sets by the Monk Quartet with Coltrane that night – an early set (tracks 1-5) and a late set (tracks 6-9), which the recording does not fully document. Other acts performing included Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Sonny Rollins, and Chet Baker with Zoot Sims. But for some of us, it's like entering a time capsule and living a glorious period of American music all over again.It was recorded on 29 November 1957 at 'Thanksgiving Jazz', a benefit concert produced by Kenneth Lee Karpe for the Morningside Community Center in Harlem.

#At Carnegie Hall Thelonious Monk And John Coltrane Zip full#

The Steinway is rumbling, bright, and present in all registers Shadow Wilson's drum kit is in your living room, the most alive percussion I've heard on a Monk session Abdul-Malik's bass is full but not boomy Coltrane's horn is not as consistently forward in the mix as is usually the case, further confirmation of his role as a contributing member of a genuine quartet.įinally, there's nothing dated about this music. The audio to my ears is pristine, better than many current 'live' recordings. To put it another way, on the Monk session, logic and structure are his friends by contrast, on the dates with Miles he's the daring and visionary artist, the Promethean romantic poet. On the earlier, treasured Prestige sides'Cookin',' 'Relaxin',' etc.≼oltrane creates engaging tensions as he tests the limits of dominant-tonic chord patterns in conventional popular standards, and on the later Columbia sessions, beginning with 'Kind of Blue,' he uses modal patterns to express a rapturous melding of movement and emotion. That's one way of looking at Coltrane's layering of chords within Monk's conducive harmonic system, but the Miles' dates frequently foreground the excitement of the search for freedom itself. T S Monk, in an interview on this site, characterizes Coltrane's playing on this date as being 'liberated' compared to the recordings with Miles. That is not to say that we don't hear much of the expected Coltrane scalular dexterity (especially on 'Blue Monk'), but at no point would it seem appropriate to generalize about his playing on this recording as 'sheets of sound.' He's not the vatic artist here but the aesthete, matching his ensemble contributions and even his solo statements to Monk's challenging, yet contained and disciplined, compositions. The insert shows a playbill on which Coltrane's name is half the size of Zoot Sims' and Sonny Rollins' namesappropriate, since his performance is equally subordinated to, or tempered by, a commitment to Monk's music.

His arpeggios fly off both ends of the keyboard while his solos continually surprise with their rhythmic displacements, suspenseful silent stretches, and piecemeal motifs that somehow cohere into melodic magic.īut Monk's strongest suit on this set is his 'third hand,' John Coltrane. Monk has never sounded more energetic or exhuberant, as though he were primed for the concert of a lifetime. Even upon an initial play, the recording is capable of commanding undivided attention from the first through the last track. I don't recall a jazz CD ever receiving as much pre-release publicity as this one, Newsweek even referring to it as the 'musical equivalent of the discovery of a new Mount Everest.' Consequently, a listener couldn't be faulted for some anticlimactic sentiments, if not outright disappointment, at having the product in hand.