The boxed set was made under the aegis of Orrin Keepnews (who died in March, at the age of ninety-one), the producer and the co-founder of the Riverside label, who, as a critic in the late forties, was among the first to recognize Monk's genius. The list of Monk's sidemen in this set indicates the level of creativity on display it includes John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, and Max Roach, and they’re all in stellar form, due not least to Monk’s own musical invigoration. These fifteen disks find Monk in a wide range of musical settings-solo, trio, quartet, quintet, sextet, septet, and a big band-and locations, including the studio, New York’s Town Hall and the Five Spot, San Francisco’s Blackhawk, and concert halls in Paris and Milan. “If you let me record the concert.”Īnd that recording sat in a box somewhere for fifty years.Ĭheck out Thelonious Monk’s Palo Alto here.Monk was the master of the single note, perfectly selected, timed, and struck so that it would have a symphonic amplitude. Well, there wasn’t a damp mood in the audience.Īnd right before Thelonious and crew broke into an electric performance composed of reinvigorated old favourites, a black janitor, to this day still unknown, approached the stage. Surely he didn’t want the concert to be as bleak and miserable as the weather? Monk was renowned for speaking in riddles. When Monk and his touring band arrived, crowds of black and white faces, an equal mix, was waiting at the high school.Ī white woman approached Monk as he waited to go on stage and asked, ‘Does the rain influence your playing?” Monk came along anyway, brining drummer Ben Riley, tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist Larry Giles, and a hungry belly. Scher felt in his gut that Monk might not turn up, so he got him on the phone and the pianist didn’t even know about the agreement. Nobody thought Scher pasting posters with Monk’s black face around a primarily white neighbourhood was a good idea for fear of riling people up.Īt two dollars a ticket, there was initial resistance, but the posters soon drew crowds of jazz fans, money in hand, eager to pack into the auditorium. This was just four years after segregation formally and legally ended, and the same year that Martin Luther King Jr. Meanwhile, Scher sets about plastering advertisements all over town.Įspecially around Palo Alto, which had a serious black-white divide. Whoever was filling in for Monk’s wife was out of his managerial depth, resulting in an agreement for Monk to play the High School, no contract, and Monk not being told of the agreement. Sony-Columbia showed their concern by billing Monk the cost of missed studio hours. Monk himself shortly followed and ended up slipping into a coma. It used to be his wife, but she went down with a serious case of the flu that took her out of commission. He sets about organising a jazz concert to be held in the high school auditorium and has his sights set on one of his idols – jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. It just so happened that Scher was head of the International Club on campus and wanted to raise money for the Peace Corps and construction projects in Kenya and Peru. This kid, a jazz lover from the age of ten, who ran the school’s jazz club, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the music, the history, the performers, and a resolute entrepreneurial spirit. They wanted to listen to the likes of Miles Davis take cool by the hand and lead it into the avant-garde.Įxcept for one 16-year-old Jewish kid: Danny Scher, a student of Palo Alto High School. Sure, bop still had it’s die-hard audience, but American music fans wanted their jazz as cool as the war they were fighting with Russia. Individualistic, innovative, constantly refreshing and reinventing himself, Monk was an original composer, like Duke Ellington.īut bebop wasn’t Capital-C Cool in the late sixties. Monk was still playing that bebop jazz – the kind he helped create. Theolonius Monk is nearing the end of his Sony-Columbia contract. Thelonious Monk ‘Palo Alto’ Album ReviewĬold War America still reeling from the fallout of the MLK and Kennedy assassinations. Let me tell you the story of the long lost jazz record of Theolonius Monk’s Palo Alto.
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