Like all geniuses, pianist Thelonious Monk was initially misunderstood, even scorned. His ideas about harmony were ahead of his time, and he definitely didn’t fit in with the strictures of bebop, the lingua franca of the jazz world in the late 1940s and early ’50s. But a few people “got” him, including the man who went on to become one of the most important jazz producers and impresarios of the era, Orrin Keepnews, who in 1955 lured Monk away from an unsatisfactory relationship with the Prestige label to his own fledgling Riverside label.
That association lasted a little over six years, from 1955 to 1961, and resulted in something like a dozen initial LP releases, during which Monk rose from obscurity to acclaim, at least among the intelligentsia. Keepnews in 1986 re-released the discs in a box set, which won a Grammy award that year. Reissued on CD in 1991, it has once again been reissued by Concord Music Group as a 15-CD set, complete with Keepnews’s original Grammy-winning liner notes, as well as his later session-by-session notes from the CD release.
There is so much music here, it’s hard to know where to start. The set has a total of 153 tracks, including all the studio sessions and live dates that made up those original Riverside LPs, as well as alternate takes curated by Keepnews that further illuminate the development of Monk’s works. They’re presented in chronological order, which sometimes conflicts with the order in which the LPs were released. My only criticism of the set is that each CD contains more than one of the original LPs, but nowhere in the notes are the tracks identified by the album on which they appeared. They’re only listed by session.
Monk is best known today for some of his original compositions: “Round Midnight,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Epistrophy,” “Nutty,” “Rhythm-a-ning,” “Crepuscule With Nellie,” “Trinkle Tinkle,” and “Bemsha Swing” among others. So the first revelation to me on this set is the first half of the first disc. It represents the very first Riverside album, which Keepnews wisely suggested stick with covers of Duke Ellington works. Monk’s covers on Thelonious Monk Plays the Music of Duke Ellington place him squarely within the tradition of Waller and The Duke but also reveal his own idiosyncratic ideas.
Another time I sat up and took notice (when I was listening to this set on headphones more or less straight through, as I went about my business for the better part of three days) was when I got to the two records that came from some live sessions at the Five Spot club in New York — Misterioso and Thelonious In Action. The energy of the hard bop music that this quartet produced is amazing. That’s Johnny Griffin on tenor, Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. And then a little later when Charlie Rouse joins up on tenor, I can really hear the good vibes between him and Monk. To me, the Rouse-Monk recordings, including those of the later Columbia years, are some of the best.
Here’s a version of ” ’Round Midnight” from Disc 12, previously unreleased before this set was released, with Rouse and Harold Land on tenors, Joe Gordon on trumpet, Shelly Manne on drums and John Orr on bass. (Ignore what it says about Coltrane in the info on the YouTube page.)
I also love the tracks that represent Mulligan Meets Monk which fall across discs 5 and 6, and the sessions with Clark Terry, which were not previously issued on their own LP. For me, the combination of a lower instrument like Gerry Mulligan’s baritone sax or Terry’s flugelhorn adds one more layer of depth and interest to Monk’s already intriguing sound. And of course there are the sides from Monk’s brief encounter with John Coltrane when the young tenor player was between stints with Miles Davis that remained the only known recordings of the two giants until the 1957 Carnegie Hall recordings were unearthed and released in 2005. Other names that appear in these Riverside sessions include Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Coleman Hawkins, Max Roach, Thad Jones and Wilbur Ware.
This award-winning anthology catches Thelonious Monk on the way to becoming the jazz icon that he is today. It really is a must-have for any fan.
(Riverside / Concord, 2015)
