New Monk-Coltrane quartet concert discovered

[Rob Damen]

A landmark discovery to say the least.

Best news I've read all day:

Library of Congress announces newly discovered Monk-Coltrane tape

From the Associated Press

The Library of Congress announced Tuesday the discovery of 55 minutes of tape made by Thelonious Monk’s jazz quartet, including tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, in Carnegie Hall. The concert was not commercially recorded.

It was found by Larry Appelbaum, the library’s jazz specialist and acting head of its magnetic recording lab, when he was making digital recordings of tapes recorded by the Voice of America in 1957 for broadcast abroad.

I've modified the article a bit to included the parts that pertained to the Monk and Coltrane tape.

Anybody else heard anything?????

Nothing was said about a release date or what label.

Cheers,

Rob

OH MY!!!!

It's late, perhaps I'm dreaming this!!!

[Noj]

Apparently they're letting some dude Larry Appelbaum frisbee it around.

[HLJ]

Coltrane and Monk recorded live togther .Thats PHAT.Peace and all that.

[Gentle Giant]

Hopefully it has better sound quality than Live at the Five Spot.

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by Noj

Apparently they're letting some dude Larry Appelbaum frisbee it around.

Larry Appelbaum is a reliable dude. (Ask Vince Kargatis--Larry is his colleague in Transparent Productions.)

[Monte Smith]

I know what I want for Christmas.

[Il Anto]

This is the best news I've read all year. I can't wait for this to be released! I wonder what the set list was.

[Noj]

Originally Posted by bluenoter

Larry Appelbaum is a reliable dude. (Ask Vince Kargatis--Larry is his colleague in Transparent Productions.)

Wow, cool! Vince has probably heard it already, right?

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by Noj

Wow, cool! Vince has probably heard it already, right?

Somehow I doubt that (AFAIK, Vince doesn't work at the Library of Congress on his day job, and I'm guessing that the recording hasn't left the building in any form), but maybe he'll reply.

[Pete C]

By the way, there are many unreleased concerts that Wally Heider recorded that one can listen to at the LOC.

[Vince Kargatis]

Haven't heard it - emailed Larry to get more details, but I know nothing atm. Larry's one of the sound engineers/archivists at the LoC (not completely sure of his title, but that's the kinda stuff he does).

[Noj]

I'm looking forward to reading anything you find out, Vince!

[John L]

[Richardo Caerleoni]

"...The Library of Congress also announced that it had discovered a tape recording of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and OTHER jazz greats [?...RC] at a Nov. 29, 1957, benefit at Carnegie Hall among some 30,000 recordings given to the Library to be digitized..."................New York Times (Arts Section) - 6 April 2005

So there is maybe even more material from this concert?

"In walked... MONK...and TRANE!"....Can't wait!

RC.



Coltrane carefully fits a new reed on his sax, and then goes up and down the scales. Monk, sitting in front of the piano, lights a Lucky Strike, says "one, two, three, four" ... In the recording room, that very day, Arvell, sound engineer, fifteen years on the job, fell in love with this music.......Louis Joos...Belgium.


ADDED...7 APRIL 2005...!!!...AND RAY! [OK, I'm a fan of his too - from this period - RC!]

April 06, 2005


Rare jazz find sweet music for registry

By Glynn Wilson
WASHINGTON — Sometimes being a library archive nerd and jazz aficionado pays off.

Larry Appelbaum, a studio engineer for the Library of Congress who also hosts a jazz show on WPFW-FM in Washington, recently was digging through some old Voice of America recordings and came across a once-in-a-lifetime find.

It was a reel-to-reel tape of a benefit concert for a Harlem community center given by Thelonious Monk and recorded at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957. The recording featured Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie and his orchestra, the Sonny Rollins trio and the Zoot Sims quartet, featuring such legendary performers as Monk, John Coltrane, Chet Baker and Shadow Wilson.

Lewis Porter, a professor in the visual and performing arts department at Rutgers University, knew the tape existed and had been searching for it for years, Appelbaum said.

Being a huge Coltrane fan, Appelbaum knew he had found something extraordinary, he said.

“It’s as if we had found a new Hitchcock film no one knew existed,” Appelbaum said. “This is one of the finds that makes it fascinating to show up for work here every day.”

The tape will be preserved along with the other selections chosen by the Library of Congress for its National Recording Registry. It will be housed in the Library of Congress, but Appelbaum figures it won’t be hard to attract the interest of a jazz-oriented music label for a commercial release.

“Someone will put it out,” he predicted.

Glynn Wilson is a reporter for States News Service

[de Selby]

“Someone will put it out,” he predicted

I can't wait!

[Clay Fink]

Go Larry!!!

[Dig Gonsalves]

Please tell me Wilbur Ware made that gig!

[kenny weir]

yes, but who is the ukelele player?

[Nefertiti]

Originally Posted by Il Anto

This is the best news I've read all year. I can't wait for this to be released! I wonder what the set list was.

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/ind...c=18484&st=40#

[John L]

Originally Posted by Dig Gonsalves

Please tell me Wilbur Ware made that gig!

I'm afraid that we are not quite that lucky. This tape is from November, 1957, with Ahmed Abdul Malik and Shadow Wilson.

But, hey, I ain't complainin' !

[Brian Olewnick]

From today's NYT:


April 25, 2005

A Jazz Discovery Adds a New Note to the Historical Record

By BEN RATLIFF

ou might reasonably think that the recorded past of American music has been mapped out - that after all the academic books and scholared-up CD reissues, we know what's between A and Z. Of the important works, anyway. Ephemera will always keep rolling in, intensifying the reds and golds of the historical picture, broadening the context.

But now this: tapes bearing nearly a full hour of the Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane, found at the Library of Congress in January. The library made the announcement this month.

The tapes come from a concert at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957, a benefit for a community center. The concert was recorded by the Voice of America, the international broadcasting service, and the tapes also include sets by the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, Ray Charles with a backing sextet, the Zoot Sims Quartet with Chet Baker, and the Sonny Rollins Trio. (Newspaper accounts of the concert indicate that Billie Holiday appeared as well, though she is not on the Voice of America tapes.)

But it is Monk with Coltrane that constitutes the real find. That band existed for only six months in 1957, mostly through long and celebrated runs at the East Village club the Five Spot. During this period, Coltrane fully collected himself as an improviser, challenged by Monk and the discipline of his unusual harmonic sense. Thus began the 10-year sprint during which he changed jazz completely, before his death in 1967. The Monk quartet with Coltrane did record three numbers in a studio in 1957, but remarkably little material, and only with fairly low audience-tape fidelity, is known to exist from the Five Spot engagement.

The eight and a half Monk performances found at the Library of Congress, by contrast, are professionally recorded, strong and clear; you can hear the full dimensions of Shadow Wilson's drum kit and Ahmed Abdul-Malik's bass. It is certainly good enough for commercial release, though none has yet been negotiated.

On the tapes, Monk is Monk, his pianistic style basically formed at least 10 years before, with its sudden drawls and rhythmic hesitations. He lets Coltrane solo at length with very little accompaniment; the saxophonist plays rows and rows of original licks and runs, built with blizzards of 16th notes. The notable exception is Coltrane's solo on "Blue Monk." Through 10 blues choruses, he builds an even crescendo of logic, letting down his guard and relying less on his stock phrases. (The other songs on the tape, from the evening's two sets, are "Monk's Mood," "Evidence," "Crepuscule With Nellie," "Nutty," "Epistrophy," "Bye-Ya," "Sweet and Lovely" and a truncated second version of "Epistrophy.")

The music was discovered by accident, during the routine practice of transferring tape from the Library of Congress's Voice of America collection to digital sound files for preservation. Larry Appelbaum, a studio engineer, supervisor and jazz specialist at the library, said that he was given a batch of about 100 tapes for digitization one day in January and looked to see what was there; among them he noticed a brown cardboard box for a 7½-inch reel, marked in pencil "sp. Event 11/29/57 carnegie jazz concert (#1)," with no names on it. It piqued his interest, and one of the boxes holding the Carnegie tapes - there were eight in all - said "T. Monk." "It got my heart racing," Mr. Appelbaum said. (None of the tape boxes mentioned Coltrane.)

No bootleg recordings of the concert are known to exist, because even though it was recorded, it was not broadcast. The Coltrane specialist Lewis Porter knew of the tape's possible existence and inquired about it years ago, but after an initial search yielded nothing, Mr. Appelbaum said, he forgot about it completely. He was surprised to finally find it, of course, but his sense of surprise has been worn down over the years.

"There's always more," Mr. Appelbaum said sagely, in a recent interview in his recording laboratory at the Library of Congress's recorded sound division. He repeated the phrase so often during the afternoon that it became a mantra.

The Library of Congress holds the country's largest collection of sound recordings, and jazz of course forms only a tiny part of it. The full extent of several essential collections is thoroughly cataloged; they include everything ever recorded at the library's Coolidge Auditorium, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell reading their work, chamber music performances by the Budapest String Quartet, and Jelly Roll Morton singing and spieling for eight hours in 1938. All of John and Alan Lomax's famous field recordings are kept there as well.

But among the collections still being cataloged are the 50,000 Voice of America tapes, which for 40 years have been housed in a dark, climate-controlled room. The tapes constitute a valuable history of radio, and of music in New York. (The Voice of America also recorded every Newport Jazz Festival from 1955, its second year, to 1976, four years after the festival relocated from Rhode Island to New York City.) The cataloging has proceeded gradually, with first priority given to the most historically important and most physically fragile material.

Michael Gray, librarian and archivist at the Voice of America, which still operates out of Washington, confirms that in 1957, and for a long time after that, the broadcast service had access to the Carnegie Hall Recording Company's services. The Voice of America was allowed to record performances at Carnegie Hall free of charge, without paying the hall or the musicians, as long as it broadcast only overseas; this was regarded as public diplomacy through music. Of course, some musicians would not consent to be recorded, which is probably why there is no Billie Holiday on the tape.

Besides satisfying jazz fans, the discovery of the Monk tape has Gino Francesconi, Carnegie Hall's archivist since 1986, excited by the idea that much more of the hall's past may be preserved than he thought. "We knew that Voice of America recorded here," he said. "But we didn't have any formal documentation of it, and it's fantastic to know that they've discovered this." There's always more.

[al j]

man, I'd like to hear that Rollins Trio too.

[Steve Reynolds]

"professionally recorded"

yeah - baby


we all need to get to hear this - quickly

[cookie]

WOW!!! wowwowwowwowwow!!

Not only is the best news all day, it's the best news in an LOOOOOONG time!

While my old fat body is glued to the chair and Internet, my insides are jumpin' around for joy and I can't get the smile out of my heart! Oh, joy!!

[clinthopson]

My "to buy" just list got a lot bigger.

[Rob Damen]

Blue Note snags Monk/Coltrane rarity

By Margo Whitmire and Chris M. Walsh
Billboard.com

Blue Note Records has emerged the triumphant owner of a 1957 recording by the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane, trumping the interest of Sony BMG’s Legacy Recordings and Verve Records. The tentatively titled “Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane: 1957 Concert” is due Sept. 27.

Jazz specialist Larry Appelbaum uncovered the coveted musical relic in January at the Library of Congress. Negotiations for commercial release rights were completed June 13. “This is one of the most important discoveries in jazz ever,” Blue Note president/CEO Bruce Lundvall says. “We’re thrilled to have it.”

Jazz historian and Blue Note consultant Michael Cuscuna calls the find “unbelievable” because Coltrane and Monk only played together for six months. “For decades people have speculated on how the group sounded after they developed,” Cuscuna says. “But all you had until now was an oral history.”

Riverside Records released three tracks from “Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane” in 1957. The only other known release was an amateur recording of a 40-minute club set at the Five Spot in New York’s East Village, released on Blue Note in 1993 as “Live at the Five Spot — Discovery!”

Lundvall calls the sound quality of previous recordings “subpar” compared with “1957 Concert,” which was recorded by the international broadcasting service Voice of America during a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. Alan Bergman, a lawyer for the Monk estate, says there are negotiations in progress for the rights to use the concert hall’s name in the title.

The album will be released jointly by Blue Note and Thelonious Records, which is owned by the jazz legend’s son, T.S. Monk, who was a Blue Note recording artist in the 1990s.

Bergman says Blue Note’s longstanding relationship with the Monk family was a factor in the label’s selection by the Coltrane and Monk estates, which have equal rights to the recording. Blue Note also owns existing catalog of early Thelonious Monk recordings.

“Blue Note is a label committed to jazz, and they seemed like a good fit,” Bergman says. “The EMI International structure is important to us, as this project will be important on a worldwide basis.”

Cuscuna’s Mosaic, a direct mail jazz reissue label, expects to release the recording on vinyl in October.

Cheers,

Rob

[Gary Sisco]

Have moicy!

[JamesH]

Very exciting news about the upcoming release. I never bought to 5 Spot recording because I don't have the patience for really bad sound.

Without question a must have.

[Surfer]

Originally Posted by Gentle Giant

Hopefully it has better sound quality than Live at the Five Spot.

LOL, I thought the same thing. That's no "holy grail". Unlistenable. Maybe this will be better.