Thelonious Monk performing Epistrophy in Denmark in 1966. The group is his classic 1960′s quartet consisting of Thelonious on piano, Charlie Rouse on Tenor, Larry Gales on Bass and Ben Riley on the drums. This is from the outstanding Jazz Icons series of DVDs.
Thelonious Monk – Monk’s Dream
Thelonious Monk – Bolivar Blues
From “Monk’s Dream” : 1962 : Columbia CL 1965
This is the debut record for Monk on Columbia Records. This version of the Thelonious Monk Quartet seems almost telepathic in their ability to play with each other. Charlie Rouse displays his uncanny skill at interpreting the complex compositions of Monk, especially on this session’s reading of Bolivar Blues. Overall the record is a great overview of Monk’s work up to this point and serves as a great introduction to his 1960′s output.
Players:
Thelonious Monk – Piano
Charlie Rouse – Piano
John Ore – Bass
Frankie Dunlop – Drums
The Giants of Jazz was a traveling group made up of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon and Kai Winding. The group toured all over the world in 1970 and 1971, before Gillespie left to honor previous obligations. He was replaced by two trumpeters: Roy Eldridge and Clark Terry. That incarnation of this famous group is heard here performing live at The Monterey Jazz Festival in 1972. The music is spirited and mixes bop classics and standards, moving perfectly back and forth from swinging numbers to perfectly paced ballads. This is part of a series of albums that were put out by Monterey Jazz Festival Records in 2008 highlighting great performances, a few more of which I hope to preview here soon.
Released 2008 : Monterey Jazz Fest Records : Catalog # 30882
Players:
Sonny Stitt – Tenor and Alto Sax
Roy Eldridge – Trumpet
Clark Terry – Trumpet
Thelonious Monk – Piano
Al McKibbon – Bass
Art Blakey – Drums
Blue ‘n’ Boogie from “Live at the 1972 Monterey Jazz Fest”
A Night In Tunisia from “Live at the 1972 Monterey Jazz Fest”
NEW YORK TIMES
March 2, 2009
By BEN RATLIFF
In 1959, at 41, Thelonious Monk had only recently located a broader audience. That February he gave a concert with a 10-piece orchestra at Town Hall: a risky, expensive way to secure an official beachhead in New York culture, a way to get beyond his reputation, such as it was, for small groups, jabbing dissonance and cultishness.
Last week’s concerts at Town Hall, on Thursday and Friday — an outgrowth of a Monk festival at Duke University in 2007 — demonstrated two different kinds of respect for the music recorded that night 50 years earlier.
In Thursday’s concert Charles Tolliver, the trumpeter and bandleader, recreated the original concert as closely as he could. (Sixteen years old then, he had been in the audience.) Following his own transcriptions of the live album’s music, he used the same instrumentation, the same order of songs, the same order of solos inside the songs.
The differences were in what couldn’t be replicated. The drummer, Gene Jackson, landed harder and more stiffly on his beats than the original one, Arthur Taylor: a generational thing. The solos were different, too, obviously, and here the tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland stood out. His style, especially on “Monk’s Mood,” annexed the broad sound and some of the mannerisms of saxophonists from that period. But the content was new in its harmony and narrative shape.
The peak of the 1959 concert, and of Thursday’s show, was Monk’s piece “Little Rootie Tootie” (with a full-band performance of Monk’s solo from a previous occasion). Mr. Tolliver likes a big, battling sound, and as conductor he drove the band hard here, punching the air for brass accents; he gave the song a sense of vengeance. But it got away from him, dragged under by soloists. For the encore version of the same song, he counted off a hyperthyroid tempo — unnaturally fast, but a good way to end an academic night.
The concert on Friday, called “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959,” more or less followed the 1959 program too. But where Mr. Tolliver treated it as a work of impregnable authority, the pianist Jason Moran came at it sideways, seeking a connection with its creator. He used not just a live band — an enlarged version of his group, the Bandwagon, which roughed up the music, isolated phrases and bent tempos to its own will — but video, still photography and recorded audio as well. It was as much inspired by identity-focused conceptual art of the 1970s as by jazz of the 1950s. Full Article…
Nice footage of the Thelonious Monk Quartet performing “Off Minor” in Germany in 1963. Players are Monk on Piano, Charlie Rouse on Tenor Sax, John Ore on Bass and Frankie Dunlop on Bass.
Thelonious Monk – Blue Monk
Thelonious Monk – Ruby My Dear
As the title suggests, Thelonious Monk recorded this album of himself unaccompanied in San Francisco in 1959. A great introduction to the talents of Monk, it features his solo take on some of his classic compositions including Blue Monk and Ruby My Dear.
Players:
Thelonious Monk – Piano
