Niko

those are the two that made history... or is there a well-known #3?

that was my first impulse as well ... also that Miles Davis phase in the late 60s, Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way... feels classic to me... Accent on the Blues, of course, I still see a lot of classic stuff coming out in the years after Coltrane's death...no, not far away from Coltrane, and after like 1982 stuff becomes even more difficult... and, yes, with Bitches Brew, the point was never glory note by note... I mean, you might argue that glory note-by-note is really an ideal from the 78 era which was still somewhat alive in the early 60s among musicians who had come to age listening to Duke Ellington's Koko...

for me, this episode is the moment where the two remaining major labels finally lost any remaining moral rights to all the tapes they're sitting on... legal entitltements move more slowly than moral ones, for good reasons, but the direction tends to be the same ... we've seen the point of game over

possible, of course, but I would find that quite surprising... this is how estates might behave, but corporations? btw, you asked about Zev Feldman's involvement, he is quite explicit about it here https://blog.discogs.com/en/thelonious-monk-palo-alto-zev-feldman/ this passage is not without irony in retrospect: "Sometimes projects just aren’t meant for certain labels, and Palo Alto certainly falls under that category. The Monk family told me about the Palo Alto recording in 2017 and we started working towards a deal with Resonance that didn’t materialize. From there, I introduced the family to my friends at Universal Music Group and they became engaged in conversations about a release with the Verve Label Group on Impulse Records!"

that's a lot better than the date in late 2039 someone on twitter reported https://twitter.com/e_laduca/status/1287574275856179200/photo/1 guess what we are reading here are different readings of "not anytime soon"

like I wrote above: For Monk's 1970 Japanese recordings, some type of clearance from Columbia was necessary according to Kelley's bio - so whatever the contract was, it seems safe to expect that some time of clearance would be necessary here as well...

agree, Columbia being the problem now would mean the maximum possible screwup / embarassement on the side of Universal / Zev Feldman etc... then again, all the signs point towards a pretty big screwup...

my best guess is that Monk was still under contract with Columbia and they are now making trouble... Kelley's book mentions that some type of clearance from Columbia was necessary for the 1970 Japanese live recordings... so that would certainly apply here as well ... of course,it's also not hard to figure that out ... so ideally Universal would have settled this early on when preparing this release... btw, don't know if this has been posted before, there's this website which collects promo material https://www.uk-promotion.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ including many pictures for the Monk release and also Robin Kelley's nice liner note essay... https://www.uk-promotion.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Robin-Kelly-Monk-Palo-Alto-Liner-Notes-Final.pdf

from here, Isoardi's interview (Ray Vasquez is also discussed elsewhere there, he was Ortega's cousin) Ortega [...] you weren't supposed to record. See, there was a recording ban, but Mory Rappaport had a nonunion label or whatever it was, and we didn't care. We just wanted to play. Isoardi To record. Ortega We thought it was great to do a recording. So we did that one, "The Clutching Hand." On the other side was Walter Benton's tune called "Home Run." It was a blues in F. At that time Walter Benton had written an introduction like a whole tone scale. The introduction was— [sings part of introduction] And his cousin Jimmy O'Brien would play like an augmented eleventh chord on the piano. [sings] But, you know, we were pretty cool for our age. We were only teenagers, you know. But anyway, we did the record, which I still think I have a copy of at home. So that was my very first recording, and it was nonunion and the whole bit. I'd never done anything like that. Isoardi Did you ever have a chance to hear it on the radio? Ever get any airplay? Ortega Possibly. Possibly. They may have played it a little on the radio once or something. I don't know. But it was called Ray Vasquez and his Beboppers, and Ray wasn't even on it. He didn't play nothing. But he got the session. You know, he got the recording session. And we didn't get paid or anything; we just did it. It was called Ray Vasquez and his Beboppers. It didn't have any of the guys' names or anything. That's all it said, "Ray Vasquez and his Beboppers."

just had another look at my copy which is dedicated to Jimmy's memory - so I think "only Al" really is the more likely scenario...

that is quite remarkable - recorded July 2 and 3 and Jimmy died August 26... so precisely 40 years ago it must have been in the pressing plant...

Al Grey / Jimmy Forrest - O.D. (out 'dere) just playing this one and realized it fit the bill, recorded in July 1980, 8 weeks before Forrest's death... and it's a nice enough organ record... also apparently the last Don Patterson recording to appear during Patterson's lifetime (the John Simon album is from 1986 but apparently only released a decade later) and - if I can trust discogs - the last recorded appearance of drummer Charlie Rice who died in 2018 at the age of 98)

Not unhappy if you end up being right...

Over here, everybody I talk to has become very pessimistic about the possibility of herd immunity or a vaccine (due to the vanishing antibodies thing)

he's got a webpage... I'd say you are both right... http://armanratip.net/indexEN.html