Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note)
aufgezeichnet am 29.11.1957
Monk’s Mood
Evidence
Crepuscule With Nellie
Nutty
Epistrophy
(Early Show)
Bye-Ya
Sweet & Lovely
Blue Monk
Epistrophy (incomplete)
(Late Show)
Thelonious Monk/John Coltrane/Ahmed Abdul-Malik/Shadow Wilson
Das Album ist seit gestern als CD im Handel erhältlich.
Im November soll das Album über Michael Cuscunas Mosaic Label auf Vinyl erscheinen.
Mike Zwerin/Herald Tribune
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.“
Norman Weinstein/allaboutjazz
Let’s be clear from the start: this discovery of a new Monk/Coltrane live concert completely puts to shame the over-hyped Five Spot CD from years ago. Not only is the sound as sterling and clear as the sound on the Five Spot date was excretory, but the performances of the stars are light years beyond that muddy recording.There is a sense that both Monk and Coltrane knew they were going to make history in 1957 at Carnegie Hall, and it’s palpable from the opening notes of “Monk’s Mood.” Monk sounds grandly baroque in summoning grandly cascading arpeggios from his piano (which sounds infinitely better than the junk pianos he was often saddled with), while Coltrane sounds immensely assured.
To really savor Coltrane’s performances, begin by listening to the studio session with Monk currently listed in the Fantasy catalog (Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane). Then listen to the Five Spot recording, and then this new discovery.
During the studio date, Coltrane sounds remarkably reserved, perhaps too star-struck still, as he was on his session with Duke Ellington, to do very much but hang on for the ride. The Five Spot recording has Coltrane sounding looser, particularly on “In Walked Bud,” but the recording sounds like it was recorded at the wrong end of a mine shaft, and much of what Coltrane played has to be imagined. Coltrane at Carnegie Hall with Monk is a man certain of his own voice while not afraid of showing his roots, clear-thinking, wonderfully focused, in tune with Monk’s logic, simpatico with the rhythm section. A case could be built that this is the finest Coltrane recording before the historic Atlantic and Impulse sessions.
High points among Coltrane’s solos abound, but my favorites are on “Nutty,” with some wild cross-conversations between Coltrane and Monk going on, and “Sweet and Lovely,” which Coltrane gooses into a galloping romp, clearly revealing his roots in early Dexter Gordon. The only dull patch for me is his lackluster accompaniment to “Crepuscule With Nellie,” which was never about Coltrane anymore than Nellie was. It was Monk’s showcase, regardless of who accompanied him.
On to Monk. After the grand opening gestures, he continues with buoyant, hyper-kinetic interpretations of “Evidence,” “Epistrophy” (two versions, the complete one perhaps the better of the two for Monk, the incomplete one more of a Coltrane showpiece), and “Blue Monk.” Very familiar fare, but toyed with harmonically and rhythmically as only Monk could do on a good night, and this was. Drummer Shadow Wilson was no Art Blakey, whom I always thought of as Monk’s most apt drummer, but he respectably kept the band churning, along with rock-steady bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
The only flaw, and a minor one at that, is the heavy set of liner notes by five different hands. Only Lewis Porter really says something that deepens appreciation of this lovely recording. Amiri Baraka and Stanley Crouch pass beyond self-parody. I suggest that their future liner notes be published as e-books, though even that format might not accommodate their stadium-sized egos.
This is, though Woody Allen hated the phrase, “jazz heaven.”
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Hey man, why don't we make a tune... just playin' the melody, not play the solos...