Monk and Trane cd release

[jazzbo]

Here's a quote from a Coltrane list subsciber that was forwarded to me, which verifies what I was told a few months ago to keep under my hat by someone who had talked to a member of the Monk family enterprise:

In January the Library of Congress made a momentous musical find: a

tape of the Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall on

Nov. 29, 1957, a rarity by a little-recorded and short-lived band that had

major historical significance. That tape - containing nearly an hour of

music - will be released by Blue Note on Sept. 27, under the title

"Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane: Live at Carnegie Hall," the record

label announced.

[Jim Dye]

HELL YEAH!

I hope they release the rest of the concert as well!

Edited June 27, 2005 by Jim Dye

[king ubu]

Whoah! That may then be the second best album of the year!

Will this have the Ware-Shadow Wilson group? The working unit? Great news, anyway!

[sidewinder]

Scott of Mosaic mentioned that they are also working on an LP release to coincide with this. ( )

[.:.impossible]

Nice! And I still haven't bought the Uptown discovery yet!!! I haven't bought anything in about four months, but that is all about to change! Great news Lon.

[Rosco]

Here's a quote from a Coltrane list subsciber that was forwarded to me, which verifies what I was told a few months ago to keep under my hat by someone who had talked to a member of the Monk family enterprise:

In January the Library of Congress made a momentous musical find: a

tape of the Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall on

Nov. 29, 1957, a rarity by a little-recorded and short-lived band that had

major historical significance. That tape - containing nearly an hour of

music - will be released by Blue Note on Sept. 27, under the title

"Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane: Live at Carnegie Hall," the record

label announced.

←

I've been waiting for this announcement since they discovered the thing... I never dared hope it would be this soon!! Can't wait!!

Apparently there was a bunch of other good stuff discovered with it... Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Zoot Sims with Chet Baker.... would it be getting my hopes up that these will see the light of day?

[Stefan Wood]

Damn that's great news!

[bertrand]

Wow. That was faster than I expected. I knew it would be on Blue Note. Makes their complete Monk box obsolete!

I listened to this session a week ago at the Library of Congress. It's as great as expected, but my favorite Monk/Trane is still the three quartet tunes on Riverside. They stretch more in the second (later) set (as always at these kind of shindigs). The version of 'Sweet And Lovely' is a highlight, with a three-minute Coltrane solo in double time.

If you are in D.C. and want to listen to it before it comes out, you can do so in the recorded sound reading room M-F 8:30-5:00. Contact Brian Cornell at 202-707-7833.

Bertrand.

[Dan Gould]

I'd say that the only drawback to this announcement is that the Bird/Diz Uptown release will now have major competition for being the most important musical discovery of the millenium.

Seriously this is fabulous news, obviously money talks and it didn't take a lot of discussion to get a deal done and get this out. Very exciting to hear a soundboard recording of this group, especially since I've found the sound of the Five Spot recording to be hard to get past and focus on the music.

[Kalo]

[gslade]

What a year for musical treasures

[ghost of miles]

More posted to the Coltrane list:

From Billboard

Blue Note Snags Monk/Coltrane Rarity

By Margo Whitmire, L.A., Chris M. Walsh, N.Y.

Blue Note Records has emerged the triumphant owner of a 1957 recording

by

the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane, trumping the interest

of

Sony BMG's Legacy Recordings and Verve Records. The tentatively titled

"Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane: 1957 Concert" is due Sept. 27.

Jazz specialist Larry Appelbaum uncovered the coveted musical relic in

January at the Library of Congress. Negotiations for commercial release

rights were completed June 13. "This is one of the most important

discoveries in jazz ever," Blue Note president/CEO Bruce Lundvall says.

"We're thrilled to have it."

Jazz historian and Blue Note consultant Michael Cuscuna calls the find

"unbelievable" because Coltrane and Monk only played together for six

months. "For decades people have speculated on how the group sounded

after

they developed," Cuscuna says. "But all you had until now was an oral

history."

Riverside Records released three tracks from "Thelonious Monk With John

Coltrane" in 1957. The only other known release was an amateur

recording of

a 40-minute club set at the Five Spot in New York's East Village,

released

on Blue Note in 1993 as "Live at the Five Spot -- Discovery!"

Lundvall calls the sound quality of previous recordings "subpar"

compared

with "1957 Concert," which was recorded by the international

broadcasting

service Voice of America during a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall.

Alan

Bergman, a lawyer for the Monk estate, says there are negotiations in

progress for the rights to use the concert hall's name in the title.

The album will be released jointly by Blue Note and Thelonious Records,

which is owned by the jazz legend's son, T.S. Monk, who was a Blue Note

recording artist in the 1990s.

Bergman says Blue Note's longstanding relationship with the Monk family

was

a factor in the label's selection by the Coltrane and Monk estates,

which

have equal rights to the recording. Blue Note also owns existing

catalog of

early Thelonious Monk recordings.

"Blue Note is a label committed to jazz, and they seemed like a good

fit,"

Bergman says. "The EMI International structure is important to us, as

this

project will be important on a worldwide basis."

Cuscuna's Mosaic, a direct mail jazz reissue label, expects to release

the

recording on vinyl in October.

[ghost of miles]

More from the list, though I don't think it adds anything new to the story:

Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane: Live at Carnegie Hall

On September 27th, Blue Note Records will release Thelonious Monk

Quartet

with John Coltrane: Live at Carnegie Hall, a never-before heard jazz

classic

that documents one of the most historically important working bands in

all

of Jazz history, a band that was both short-lived and, until now,

thought to

be frustratingly under-recorded. The concert, which took place at the

famed

New York hall on November 29, 1957, was preserved on newly-discovered

tapes

made by Voice of America for a later radio broadcast that were located

at

the Library of Congress in Washington DC earlier this year.

1957 was a pivotal year in the lives and careers of both Thelonious

Monk and

John Coltrane. For Monk, 1957 began auspiciously. For several years the

pianist had been unable to perform in New York City's clubs and concert

halls due to the loss of his cabaret card, but with the help of his

manager

Harry Colomby and the patroness Nica de Koenigswarter, he regained his

card

early that year, and immediately began working again around town.

Monk had been on the verge of a breakthrough since 1955. Having been

instrumental in the birth of bebop as the house pianist at the Harlem

club

Minton's Playhouse, as well as playing in the bands of Charlie Parker

and

Dizzy Gillespie, Monk was given his first opportunity to make his own

records as a leader by Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records in 1946. After

making a series of early recordings for Blue Note and then Prestige, he

began to reach a wider audience upon his move to Riverside in 1955.

However, due to his inability to perform in New York during that time

period, and his unwillingness to travel, mainstream recognition was

still

out of reach. So, upon the return of his cabaret card in 1957, Monk

wasted

no time in getting back on track. His first gig was an open-ended

engagement

at the Five Spot Café in the East Village for which he hired a quartet

that

included the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane.

For Coltrane, 1957 began with the lowest point of his career. He had

been

lifted from obscurity two years previous when Miles Davis hired him

into his

quintet, but by late-1956 Coltrane's heroin addiction had started to

interfere with his performance. After several warnings, Davis finally

ran

out of patience, and in April 1957 fired the saxophonist for his

unreliability. Having squandered his best job to-date, he returned home

to

Philadelphia, and in May he kicked his addiction cold turkey. Years

later,

Coltrane would also describe this as a moment of spiritual reawakening,

a

path that would ultimately lead to perhaps his greatest achievement, A

Love

Supreme. And so it was with a renewed spirit and dedication that

Coltrane

returned to New York in the late-Spring/early-Summer of 1957, began

attending Monk's informal workshops at his apartment, and eventually

joined

Monk's quartet at the Five Spot in late-July.

The Five Spot engagement was a triumph. The club was packed with lines

around the block every night of what would become a five-month

engagement.

Monk was finally given the recognition that he long deserved, and

Coltrane,

inspired by Monk's music and pedagogy, began developing at an

astounding

rate. "My time with Monk brought me into association with a supreme

architect of music," Coltrane said in a Down Beat article. Coltrane

also

made his first great record, Blue Train, for Blue Note Records in

September

1957, just two months before the Carnegie Hall concert.

Which brings us to November 29, 1957. Monk and Coltrane had been

working

together for a solid four months by the time they set foot on stage at

Carnegie Hall that night. By all accounts, Coltrane had been tentative

early

on in the Five Spot run, challenged at first by Monk's quirky melodies

and

chord changes, but the 51 minutes of music captured in pristine sound

quality on Live at Carnegie Hall, present the quartet, which was

completed

by bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik and drummer Shadow Wilson, at the height

of

their powers.

The quartet performed two short sets, with the repertoire largely

culled

from Monk's book. The first set consists of "Monk's Mood," "Evidence,"

"Crepuscule with Nellie," "Nutty" and "Epistrophy." The second set they

stretched out a bit more, opening with "Bye-Ya," followed by the sole

standard "Sweet & Lovely," "Blue Monk" and closing with an incomplete

second-take of "Epistrophy" that ends when the tape runs out.

The concert, which was a benefit for the Morningside Community Center

in

Harlem, boasted a jaw-dropping line-up of artists that also included

Billie

Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Chet Baker with Zoot Sims, and

Sonny

Rollins, and was recorded for a later broadcast overseas by Voice of

America.

The month after the Carnegie Hall concert the Five Spot run finally

came to

an end, Coltrane left Monk's quartet ignited from that spark of

creativity,

and proceeded to change the face of jazz over the remaining 10 years of

his

life, at first reuniting with Miles Davis to create such landmark

recordings

as Round About Midnight and Kind of Blue, and then creating his own

landmarks such as Giant Steps and A Love Supreme, the latter with his

own

classic quartet featuring McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones.

Monk's

star also continued to rise. The pianist eventually found another tenor

saxophonist that could embody his music in the person of Charlie Rouse,

went

to sign with powerhouse label Columbia Records, and grace the cover of

TIME

magazine.

The tapes from that evening at Carnegie Hall were inadequately labeled,

filed away amongst the Voice of America's vast collection of

recordings, and

apparently forgotten until January 2005 when Larry Applebaum, a

supervisor

and jazz specialist at the Library of Congress, came upon them by

accident

during the routine process of digitally transferring the Library's

collection for preservation purposes. Applebaum noticed a set of tapes

simply labeled "sp. Event 11/29/57 carnegie jazz concert (#1)," with

one of

the tapes barring the sole marking "T. Monk." All of the evening's

performances, with the sole exception of Billie Holiday's performances

were

present in the set.

Until now, remarkably little recorded documentation of Monk's quartet

with

Coltrane has been known to exist, a fact that makes this finding all

the

more significant. The quartet did record three tracks in the studio for

Riverside over the summer of 1957, "Ruby My Dear," "Trinkle, Tinkle"

and

"Nutty," which were released as Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, and

in

1993, Blue Note released an amateur recording, titled Live at the Five

Spot-Discovery!, which was taken from Naima Coltrane's (John's wife at

the

time) handheld recording device of Monk's quartet in September 1958

after

Coltrane had left the band but returned temporarily to fill in for

tenor

saxophonist Johnny Griffin.