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THELONIOUS MONK QUARTET WITH JOHN COLTRANE AT CARNEGIE HALL
BLUE NOTE
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Summer of ’57: Miles has fired Coltrane for the latter’s junkie ways. He gets clean and studies at the hands of bebop’s master theoretician, Thelonious Monk, in a nine-month residency at New York’s Five Spot. Other documents of the collaboration are attenuated: a club session recorded by Coltrane’s wife Naima (also available on Blue Note) suffers from muddy sound. A studio date for Riverside is relatively subdued. But here’s the full flower, recorded by Voice of America and recently unearthed in the Library of Congress. Recorded in late November, it shows the relationship by now is sure-footed and free. Tunes like the opening "Monk’s Mood" and "Sweet and Lovely" actually sound arranged, the former with its delicate entrances, exits, and duo passages, the latter with its furious shifts in and out of double-time. In other sessions, Monk laid out while Coltrane unfurled his "sheets of sound," but here he’s with him all the way, skimming the keyboard with arpeggiated obbligati, plunking the chord patterns, keeping the saxophonist in the tune. His own patterns leap and tumble — on "Nutty" he suddenly plonks some bass notes as if with his elbow, and elsewhere he sets up subtle tensions with the horn. For once, a "discovery" worth the fuss.
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