Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane At Carnegie Hall (CD)


Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane

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Amoeba Review

John Schacht 06/16/2010

This record is miraculous, and for once that’s not hyperbole. Recorded at a 1957 Thanksgiving benefit concert for a Harlem community center, it features two titans of jazz meeting as one ascends and the other solidifies his standing as an innovator of the highest order. Equally engaging is the story behind this 2007 release: the pristine-sounding session – tracks 1-5 were taken from an early set, tracks 6-9 from a more relaxed late set – sat in a Library of Congress vault for nearly half a century until its rediscovery in 2005. The tapes were then restored by producer Michael Cuscuna and T.S. Monk (Thelonious Monk's son), and once released received the same sort of acclaim (at least in the jazz world) that you’d hear if they’d found Amelia Earhart’s plane. More importantly, the music puts the only other previous live recording of this rare ensemble – Live at the Five Spot, recorded by Coltrane’s first wife Naima on amateur equipment – to shame. And by this Carnegie Hall date, the six-month Monk and Coltrane Five-Spot residence had yielded results, the young tenor having mastered Monk’s off-kilter chord structures and rhythms. Indeed, from the opening duet “Monk’s Mood,” Coltrane not only sounds right at home but also like he’s in the process of taking Monk’s complexities into another dimension altogether. The saxophonist’s uncanny timing nestles right in with Monk’s syncopated chord progressions on “Evidence,” and the opening flurry of notes on the swinging “Nutty” offers a glimpse of Coltrane’s “sheets of sound,” Monk’s chord vamps keeping things grounded. The opening interplay between the two giants as they state the theme on “Epistrophy” is something to behold, and Monk’s opening statement on the gorgeous blues “Crepuscule With Nellie” is among his best renditions of his classic. The rhythm section drives everything forward confidently: Drummer Shadow Wilson rides his cymbals as hard as the skins whenever the tempo flares, and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, impressive throughout, follows Monk’s percussive comping as only someone who’s absorbed the pianist’s song architecture could. Even the one non-Monk standard here, “Sweet and Lovely,” stands out for the pianist’s sensitive solo, Coltrane matching him glissando for cascading glissando until the song goes double-time half-way through. At that point, Coltrane simply lifts off, heralding the style he’d soon be exploring full-time with his own quartet. An incomplete second-set take of “Epistrophy” closes the record, the only flaw in this gem of a release that also includes voluminous liner notes and essays from controversial poet Amiri Baraka, and critics Ira Gitler and Stanley Crouch. Read More


Track Listing



Disc 1 Titles
Artist
Length
1.
Monk's Mood 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane 07:52
2.
Evidence 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane 04:41
3.
Crepuscule with Nellie 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane 04:26
4.
Nutty 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane 05:03
5.
Epistrophy 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane 04:29
6.
Bye-Ya 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , Coltrane 06:31
7.
Sweet and Lovely 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane 09:34
8.
Blue Monk 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane 06:31
9.
Epistrophy [Incomplete Take] 		Thelonious Monk Quartet , John Coltrane 02:24

Currently Unavailable
$15.98
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