New Monk-Coltrane Performance Discovered

[JSngry]

So there's a Sonny trio date in there as well?

[agriffith]

WOW! A live version of Monk's Mood w/ Trane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! + Bye-Ya, etc.

Somebody's gotta put this out!

And I'm with you on the Newk trio thing Jim!

[Lazaro Vega]

RARE JAZZ TAPES UNCOVERED AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

At a press conference today in Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress

announced that historically significant concert tapes, featuring the

legendary jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and iconic saxophonist

John Coltrane, had been uncovered in the Library’s recorded sound

collection during preparation for preservation.

The 1957 tapes were recorded at Carnegie Hall by the Voice of America

(VOA) for broadcast overseas but have never been heard in the United

States. The VOA concert tapes also include performances that same evening

by the late Ray Charles, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the Dizzy

Gillespie Orchestra and the Zoot Sims Quartet with Chet Baker.

“These previously unknown tapes are a major find for scholars and

collectors of post-war jazz,” said Larry Appelbaum, the Library’s

recording engineer and jazz specialist in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting

and Recorded Sound Division, who found the tapes among material to be

digitized as part of the Library’s continuing audio preservation program.

“A significant discovery like this reminds us why it’s so important to

preserve these unique materials.”

The announcement was made as part of a press briefing on Librarian of

Congress James H. Billington’s annual selection of 50 sound recordings for

the National Recording Registry. Under the terms of the National Recording

Preservation Act of 2000, the Librarian is responsible for annually

selecting recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically

significant.” The list can be found on the Library’s Web site at

www.loc.gov.

The content of VOA’s original 10-inch mono acetate tapes of the Carnegie

Hall concert will be preserved in high-resolution digital files, which

will be stored and backed up on the Library’s servers. Along with

introductions by VOA program host Willis Conover, the tapes feature

approximately 55 minutes of previously unheard Monk and Coltrane and early

and late show performances by all of the groups who performed that

evening. The Monk Quartet with Coltrane plays “Evidence,” “Monk’s Mood,”

“ Crepescule With Nellie,” “Nutty,” “Epistrophy,” “Bye-Ya, Sweet and

Lovely” and “Blue Monk.”

The Library of Congress holds the nation’s largest public collection of

sound recordings (music and spoken word) and radio broadcasts. The

collection of nearly 3 million recordings representing almost every sound

recording format includes more than 500,000 LPs, 450,000 78-rpm discs,

500,000 unpublished discs, 200,000 compact discs, 175,000 tape reels,

150,000 45-rpm discs and 75,000 cassettes. Among the unusual formats in

the collection are wires, instantaneous discs, cylinders, music box discs,

rolls, bands, dictabelts and Memovox discs.

The Library’s collection includes more than 50,000 VOA tapes and discs of

musical events broadcast from 1946-1988. The Library ’s jazz collections

include musical scores, manuscripts, photographs and personal recording

collections of Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, Milt Hinton, Carmen McRae,

Billy Taylor, Charlie Barnett, Louis Bellson and others.

# # #

PR 05-90

04/06/05

ISSN 0731-3527

[mikeweil]

I say it again: Monk Jr. or Cuscuna should start negotiations to issue this stuff as soon as possible!

[brownie]

Hope we will be also able to enjoy soon the Sonny Rollins Trio (Wendell Marshall, Kenny Dennis) and the Zoot Sims (with Chet Baker) contributions to the two concerts!

[king ubu]

Hope we will be also able to enjoy soon the Sonny Rollins Trio (Wendell Marshall, Kenny Dennis) and the Zoot Sims (with Chet Baker) contributions to the two concerts!

why not a little box set with all of it? (yeah, I keep on dreaming...)

[Tom in RI]

If Monk was the leader on the date, would only the Monk estate be responsible for signing off on release of this or would all four musician's estates have to give permission? If the Monk estate does agree to release of this material, would they automatically have a right to it or does it remain owned by the Library of Congress?

[marcello]

This information is from the jazzproglist:

From: Matt Snyder <msnyder@NYPL.ORG>

Larry Appelbaum at Library of Congress made this announcement the other

day on another list I'm on, but people here may be interested as well:

I've been holding off announcing this until LC was ready, but I recently

discovered some unpublished, previously unknown tapes at the Library of

Congress of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie

Hall on Nov. 29, 1957. The tapes were recorded by the Voice of America

during a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. The evening consisted of an

early and late show and the Monk Quartet tapes total approx 55 mins. The

quartet includes Ahmed Abdul Malik, bass; and Shadow Wilson, drums. Other

artists on this concert include the Sonny Rollins Trio w/Wendell Marshall

and Kenny Dennis, The Zoot Sims Quartet w/Chet Baker, the Dizzy Gillespie

Orchestra, and Ray Charles (w/Ed Blackwell, drums!). Billie Holiday was

reportedly also on this concert, but she does not appear to have been

recorded.

For those interested in such things, we have preserved these tapes by

making high resolution digital files with appropriate metadata.

Anticipating your questions, LC can not make any copies unless proper

copyright clearances have been secured. I have informed both T.S. Monk and

Ravi Coltrane about these tapes.

This reminds us, there's always more.

[End Quote]

Matt Snyder

Music Archivist

Wilson Processing Project

The New York Public Library

[bertrand]

The estates of all the musicians on the date have to give their OK. There's also the original festival producer, and probably some more.

Everybody wants a cut.

Bertrand.

[JSngry]

I'd like all the cuts, thank you, and in a box set if you please!

[jazzbo]

It's going to come out. Won't be too long either. My magic eight ball said so.

[DrJ]

Wow - what a wonderful unexpected windfall this would be. Agree- deluxe box, pull out the stops. Wonder what sound quality will be like?

[John B]

Wow - what a wonderful unexpected windfall this would be. Agree- deluxe box, pull out the stops. Wonder what sound quality will be like?

from today's NYT:

"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."

[jazzbo]

YAHOO!

[MartyJazz]

Meanwhile, the article casually mentions the discovered tape(s) also contain a recording of the Sonny Rollins Trio! Remember, this is 1957 vintage. I'm very hot for that as well!

[gslade]

Meanwhile, the article casually mentions the discovered tape(s) also contain a recording of the Sonny Rollins Trio! Remember, this is 1957 vintage. I'm very hot for that as well!

Wow! more new treasures

this is great

[ghost of miles]

Here's the full Ratliff piece, posted to the Coltrane list. Sounds like there's a good deal of Coltrane soloing:

A Jazz Discovery Adds a New Note to the Historical Record

By BEN RATLIFF

You 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.

[Guy Berger]

Wow... Monk & Trane live in '57. And unlike the Five Spot CD Blue Note released a while back, this looks like the real thing!

Guy

[mikeweil]

And unlike the Five Spot CD Blue Note released a while back, this looks like the real thing!

... cause Shadow Wilson was GREAT!!! (Roy Haynes, too, but Shadow was something else.)

[Trader]

I thought the original bassist for the legendary quartet was Wilbur Ware. Not quite the real deal (not Ware, not at the Five Spot where they created the legend), but that's nit-picking, this is still an AWESOME find.

[Big Deal]

Yep, according to todays NYT this was never heard in the US because the

VOA had an agreement to record for free, but only for overseas play.

The quilty is said to be strong and clear. As of yet, no commercial release has

been negotiated.

[Pure]

Yeah, this is just too cool.

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

Saw something about MC looking to get this out on vinyl as well (Oct.?). That still the plan? Anyone heard anything about cover art or so?

[jazzbo]

I guarantee: there will be cover art!

You heard it here first!

[alankin]

My magic eight ball says end of September.