John L

Very interesting! I look forward to seeing a discography.

I wish I had known you were going. We could have met there.

I would highly suggest getting the Monk in Philadelphia compilation. There are quite a number of great rare and unusual tracks on that one from various periods in Monk's career. I don't see Stockholm 1961 on your list. Maybe you already have it. That is a favorite of mine, released in good sound by Dragon. I really like the Palais Des Beaux-Arts & Copenhagen (M.O.N.K.) recordings from the 1963 Europe tour. They are in great (professional) sound and Monk is in very good form (IMO). If you only get one of them, I would recommend Palais Des Beaux-Arts. I am less thrilled by the Paris concert on this tour. The Village Gate 1963 is in somewhat muffled sound. But I have always really liked what Monk plays on this date. Paris Olympia 1965 is also not to be missed. But beware of the so-called "volume 4" which is actually tracks from some of the Riverside Europe 1961 records. I really like a lot of music that Monk played on the 1966 Europe tour. His approach to many of the songs was notably different to the previous tours. I have a difficult time recalling which of the many concerts from that tour are the best. But I would suggest getting a representative sample. John

RIP to one of the great original artists of his time. 😔

Not awful, but damn am I sick of Hotel California. Having lived and worked all over the globe, I can say that there doesn't seem to be a single place left that hasn't been infected with that song. When I would go to see my favorite highlife and Afro-beat bands in Nigeria, they would be sure and dedicate one song to me (their "white brother from another mother"), and it would always be frickin' Hotel California. When I was living in Alma-Aty, Kazakhstan, we created the only blues band in the country and had a regular gig every Saturday. One night, a heavily drunk teenager came up to us and requested Hotel California. We told him that we don't play that song. After we finished that night, the manager told us that we were fired. The drunk kid was the son of an Akim (regional political leader) and demanded that we never appear again. I could really enjoy the rest of my life without ever coming into contact with that song again.

Wow - a living legend songwriter of the 20th century. RIP Mr. Bacharach

Nice. I hope that this won't be one of those LP only deals.

That also puzzled me at first. But if you look at the fine print in the discography, you will see the explanation. It is apparently J.C. Heard's solo on The Challenges. So the discography lists only the challenges. I guess that they don't have a version that wasn't spliced by Norman Granz. The other drum solo tracks are similar.

I have always loved that first concert on the Mosaic box ever since I picked it up this LP when it came out in the 1970s. I was waiting for decades for it to finally be released on CD.

It is a distillation of the material on the Mosaic, which covers Brunswick and Columbia recordings from 1932-1940. There is nothing from RCA. The Ellington orchestra recorded almost exclusively for Brunswick and Columbia in the latter half of the 1930s.

While I concur with the other additional recommendations above, I think that the most glaring omission in your collection is the 1930s orchestra. I consider that to be some of the very greatest Duke Ellington. The best purchase that you could make, in my opinion (if you can find it), is the Mosaic 1932-1940 Brunswick / Columbia collection. That is a large and astounding collection of music that has almost no duplication with what you listed above. Chronological classics from this period is another way to go, although the sound quality is inferior, they duplicate the Mosaic small group set, and include a lot of secondary pop vocal tracks.

If Mosaic can't even make us happy with their service, the are not going to get anywhere with the general public.

Well, I have listened through the box already and it is pretty incredible. I was surprised at how little of this music I had previously. It turns out that the vast majority of my previous JATP recordings from this period were unofficial and therefore not even included on this set. I think that Mosaic is under-selling this set a bit in its advertisements. Most of this music is rare. Nothing much of it was ever released on CD with the exception of the Krupa/Rich Drum Battle and the Opera House recordings of Hawkins/Eldridge, Getz/J.J. Johnson and Ella Fitzgerald (A track was actually omitted from the Hawkins/Eldridge CD for space reasons that is restored here). Hell, there is some Pres and Bean here that is previously unreleased in any form! I seem to recall that Larry Kart posted here that he was at the September 1957 concert at the Chicago Opera House that included Lester Young, Sonny Stitt, and Illinois Jacquet. Interestingly, it would appear that the LP that was released as the "The JATP All-Stars At The Opera House" included music not from that concert but from a performance done one month later at the Shine in LA. This set presents the known music from both concerts, including previously unreleased performances from Chicago. I am VERY SATISFIED with this set. Bravo, Mosaic!

Almost like magic, after I wrote that post, I got a shipping notification.

For this pre-order, as well as my last one from Mosaic, I never even received any sort of confirmation about it. When I gave my credit card online a week ago, I just got a message that my order is "being reviewed." That is it. Last time I sent 5 emails to inquire about it that went unanswered. Client relations at Mosaic have really reached a low point.

Jim's original answer to the question with the Warne Marsh cover was a somewhat subtle but good one. It is much easier for a non-musician to recognize the changes of a standard when the soloist is playing around the melody as opposed to something completely different on the changes. I am speaking for myself, although I am not sure if I qualify as a "non-musician." I am not a professional but I do play music (mostly non-jazz). I can almost always recognize changes, including passing chords, although I certainly cannot always recognize what the changes were.

Joe Williams could ALSO sing great blues.

When I became a jazz fan in the mid-1970s, my biggest hope was that Monk would come again to the West Coast where I was living. It never happened.

There is no question about Monk's greatness as a composer. But I consider the unique way that Monk played music to be at least as great a legacy.

Pick this one up if you can still find it. If I could have only one blues disc, it would be disc 2 from this set. (It is not a selected compilation as the title might suggest but all of Muddy Waters' first recordings for Chess)

Yes. The closest thing that we have are the Billy Eckstine band recordings from 1944-1945. But Bird wasn't present on any of those.

That is a really fine session.

I saw him a few times in Paris toward the end of his life.

In an essay in on Miles Davis in "The All American Skin Game," Crouch writes a paragraph on the December 24, 1954 session, which mostly praises Thelonious Monk's contributions to the date. I have it in the 1996 anthology "Reading Jazz" edited by Robert Gottlieb. But maybe you have in mind a longer essay.

Or the Munich tracks?