Thelonious Monk – Palo Alto (The Custodian’s Mix) RSD Favorites: Thelonious Monk’s Palo Alto and Kenny Dorham’s Quiet Kenny. As a jazz fan RSD can be hit-and-miss, but I ended up taking home some stellar releases, and am glad I hit the lines early for all three. Read my thoughts on the RSD concept and the June event here. Including the low-key Black Friday Record Store Day there were three RSD events in 2021, with the first two taking place in June and July. What’s the most fascinating to me is that the age of jazz listeners is dropping and that’s a very positive trend classical music has a very different problem which isn’t good for the genre. There were some outstanding new releases and reissues in 2021, and I know from my Instagram feed and follows that interest in jazz music – audiophile reissues, Tone Poet remasters, previously unreleased vault finds, Record Store Day limited editions - has never been higher. We won’t have the final 2021 numbers until late-January 2022, but it was clearly the best year for new record sales in almost 30 years.īlackbyrd: One of my Calgary regular stops.Īlthough I listen to music in a variety of genres, my bread and butter is jazz, so that’s where I’m going to focus my attention. Consumers purchased over 20M new records in the United States alone in H1 2021. It’s fair to say that with little else to do or spend their money on, music fans picked up a lot of titles in 2021 and music stores sold a lot of vinyl. Monk is offered as a digital release and as a limited edition vinyl LP.It’s that time of year again as we approach mid-December to take a hard look back at the past 12 months and the best albums of 2021. 28, 1964) but the magazine would dedicate more than five-thousand words to the works, workings, and failings, of one of the most enigmatic artists in jazz history. A year after this performance, Monk would not only be one of only four jazz artists to appear on the cover of Time (Feb. The quartet reworks the standards through imaginative readings their playing is loose but adheres to the original melodies and Monk's favored blues shadings. Gearbox Records has done a masterful job in restoring the original tapes and capturing the qualities of the live performance on Monk. "Bye-Ya"also approaching double-digit lengthis an improvisational gem for both Monk and Rouse who gives the tenor a near-human voice on "Monk's Dream." At more than nine minutes, Ore and Dunlop have a bit of time in the spotlight as well. The underrated Rouse plays in both muscular and lyrical styles on "Nutty" andoften in direct contrastMonk has never sounded more eloquent.
THELONIOUS MONK ALBUM COVERS FULL
The live forms of the Monk pieces areas one may expect in a live formatconsiderably longer than the studio versions allowing the listener a full appreciation of the players. Another 1954 Prestige release, Thelonious Monk Plays contained the original version of "Nutty." The Monk originals accompany the covers of "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" and "Body and Soul" (which he covered on Thelonious Himself (Riverside, 1957) and Two Hours with Thelonious (Riverside, 1963) respectively. (Blue Note's 1951 Genius of Modern Music: Volume 1 was credited as a Monk release but was actually a compilation). Thelonious Monk Trio (Prestige, 1954) included "Bye-Ya" and "Monk's Dream" and is generally considered his first album as a leader. Three of the five compositions are Monk originals that appeared on his earliest studio albums.
The group functioned at a time when Monk was moving away from a highly inventive phase to less challenging material but it was with these personnel dynamics that the music came to life. Saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist John Ore and drummer Frankie Dunlop filled the Monk quartets that recorded Criss-Cross and Monk's Dreamboth released on Columbia in 1963and arguably, two of Monk's best recordings. The result is Monk, a pristine collection of Monk classics as performed by his most highly regarded quartet. The engineers at the UK's Gearbox Records undertook a painstaking process to restore and master the original tapes, found in a London dumpster. The status of Thelonius Monk in the early 1960s, is indisputable and this recently discovered session recorded at a live performance in Copenhagen's Old Fellow Palæet, in 1963 validates the pianist's standing. Closely following the release of John Coltrane's Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album (Impulse!, 2018), this year brings us another previously unreleased gem from the golden age of jazz.