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New Monk-Coltrane Performance Discovered


JSngry

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  • 2 weeks later...

Allrighty then..... any chance you two guys can rub each others magic balls and give us the skinny on the Cuscuna/vinyl matter?

I spoke with Scott Wenzel from Mosaic in late June and he said that Mosaic will be releasing it on vinyl.

For really good vinyl sound, this will have to be a 2 lp set. 51+ minutes is short for that at current vinyl costs.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I had the good fortune to preview a part of this release last night. A friend got a copy from a friend who got it from T S Monk. He couldn't give me a copy, but I got to hear it.

It's brilliant.

There is a superb interplay between Monk and Trane, and Shadow Wilson is a treat. The sound is excellent.

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I had the good fortune to preview a part of this release last night.  A friend got a copy from a friend who got it from T S Monk.  He couldn't give me a copy, but I got to hear it.

It's brilliant.

There is a superb interplay between Monk and Trane, and Shadow Wilson is a treat.  The sound is excellent.

I've heard the whole thing - absolutely brilliant! As intimate as I am with just about everything by Monk and Trane, I have to say that there are things on here that will surprise and delight everybody!

:(:(:(

Awww!!! Stop teasing us you guys!!! :crazy:

I am sooooo looking forward to this... :excited:

But I ain't diggin' the artwork, baby :unsure:

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I've heard the whole thing - absolutely brilliant! As intimate as I am with just about everything by Monk and Trane, I have to say that there are things on here that will surprise and delight everybody!

I listened to the first set with headsets on while in the gym yesterday. Had people staring at me in amusement as I was apparently quite vocal in my enjoyment. Terrific, must have jazz. Between this and the Diz 'n Bird at Town Hall, it's been quite a year for "new" stuff from the giants.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Also received an advance copy of this and it is going to make a lot of people happy. Much like the Bird/Diz Town Hall discovery, there's just something extra special about finding a never-been-heard-before live recording of jazz greats. Look forward to purchasing the whole package -liner notes 'n all.

Marla

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Nice review in the IHT today by Mike Zwerin.

By Mike Zwerin Bloomberg News

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2005

The CD "Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall" on Nov. 29, 1957, to be released by Blue Note at the end of September, is the only full-length, full- quality recording of one of the most legendary collaborations in jazz history.

The quartet existed less than six months, and, except for those of us who heard it live, it was pretty much forgotten for 50 years. Until January, when Larry Appelbaum of the Recorded Sound Division at the U.S. Library of Congress was preparing a batch of Voice of America tapes for digitalization and got curious.

He opened a minimally and ambiguously labeled plain white box holding a reel of tape. Listening to it, he recognized Monk and Coltrane, and he heard that the sound quality was excellent. Appelbaum recalls, by e-mail, that his heart "began to race."

My heart raced to the same music for most of the summer of 1957. I had sublet a loft from a painter on Second Avenue, and the Five Spot café, one block away on the Bowery, became my New York locale. In residence there, Monk and Coltrane and the same band that would play Carnegie Hall three months later were making the most dynamic, original, and charismatic jazz music since Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in 1945.

During the first few nights, it troubled me that, although the music was obviously good, I was having such difficulty keeping up with it. I felt somehow threatened. I wished Monk sounded more like Bud Powell, and Coltrane's long, overwhelming "sheets of sound" made me nostalgic for Lester Young's Mozartian eloquence.

Why was I longing for the past like some moldy fig? Was I losing my edge? By the end of the first week, however, I was asking myself why I was going every night to listen so long and so hard to music I supposedly didn't like.

After being fired by Miles Davis because of his heavy heroin habit, Coltrane had cleaned up and was in the process of replacing drugs with spirituality. He was playing fresh out of the box, as though newly hatched, like his life depended on it. He tended to repeat his own phrases and runs, yet he kept changing their placement, and what phrases and runs they were. It was more like an aural tapestry than a collection of licks. Whatever it was, you wanted it to go on forever.

Miles would soon hire Coltrane back for the band that recorded "Kind of Blue." It was a pivotal year for Monk as well. He had just received his cabaret card, permitting him to work in New York clubs for the first time in years. He was dancing around the stage whenever he laid out, and when he sat down to play his closely voiced chords and childlike arpeggios with the trademark rhythmic stutters, it was obvious that playing with Coltrane was sending him to a rare and happy zone.

The two of them were personifications of the old adage that new ideas go through three phases - the joke, the threat and the obvious. At the time, they were about ready to graduate from the threat phase. (Eventually, you would hear them in elevators and airports.) At first, the audience in the Five Spot consisted mostly of painters, musicians and beatniks. More and more people came from uptown as the summer wore on and word got out. Everybody in the audience had one thing in common - we were all aware that we were in on something special.

The unsung hero of the band turns out to be the drummer, Shadow Wilson, who accents the soloists as though he was still playing with Count Basie, only softer. The clarity of the sound enables you to hear his deft cymbal work. He and the bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik maintain a remarkable, firm - yet anything but old-fashioned - groove in the middle of the beat, allowing the soloists to concentrate on pushing and pulling on it.

One of the best things about jazz is the elasticity of its swing. Monk's son TS Monk, who helped produce the album, has said that Wilson was his father's favorite drummer.

The band was the missing link in the history of jazz between bebop and the free music of Ornette Coleman, who would make his New York debut at the Five Spot two years later.

Listening to "At Carnegie Hall" now is kind of like discovering a new Beethoven piano sonata. Listening to it loud is recommended. I am discovering new details after hearing the album maybe 30 times. It still sounds like new music.

"Treasures like this still exist," Appelbaum says, by e-mail again. "This heritage is part of our cultural identity. It tells us something about who we are. It's why I look forward to coming to work every day. There's always more."

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