San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How 1968 Palo Alto High concert became new Thelonious Monk live album.
Thelonious Monk is back. Modern jazz’s most revered and recorded composer died in 1982 at the age of 67, but a new live album titled “Palo Alto” was set to be released at the end of July by Universal Music as a reminder of his prowess as a pianist and bandleader. Then, just days before giddy jazz fans got to hear the 1968 concert recorded at Palo Alto High School, Universal announced that the album was postponed, with word eventually surfacing that the project had been torpedoed by a dispute between Monk’s estate and his previous label, Columbia (now owned by Sony).
“It was a big surprise,” Doug Holloway, one of the album’s producers, told The Chronicle. “It came out of left field.”
“There was some confusion about whether or not Thelonious Monk even had a record deal at the time of the recording,” which led to a timeout “while everything was worked out between different record companies and the Thelonious Monk estate,” explained Danny Scher, the precocious impresario who orchestrated the gig as a “Paly” High junior.
Neither Holloway nor Monk’s son, jazz and R&B drummer T.S. Monk, provided details about the agreement that put “Palo Alto” back into circulation, but the album will now be available Friday, Sept. 18, via Impulse! Records on CD and LP as well as in a digital format via Sony’s Legacy Recordings.
For Scher, who held onto the concert tapes for half a century, the denouement is a desperately needed bright spot in a plagueafflicted year. He hails the rescheduled release as a winwin “leading to everyone getting along and a joyous outcome,” much like the response to the performance itself in 1968.
If Scher attributes heightened social significance to “Palo Alto,” it’s because the concert itself took on a potent symbolic role in the midst of another year marked by assassinations, war and riots. The music itself, a 47minute tour de force by a band at the peak of its prowess, ranks among Monk’s best with his longrunning quartet.
“Everyone was in the zone,” T.S. Monk said. “The thing I realized about Thelonious, he was really a live artist. He made great studio records, but he was basically underrecorded, so he concentrated on his live performances.”
The tale of how the pianist’s quartet came to perform in Palo Alto High School’s auditorium on a rainy fall Sunday afternoon adds an irresistible backstory to a thrilling new entry in one of the 20th century’s most consequential discographies.
Masterminded by a 16yearold Scher, Monk’s performance took place at a particularly fraught moment in the often-difficult relationship between the university town and its responsible for more than four dozen tunes that form a cornerstone of the jazz repertoire, Monk didn’t know he was servredlinedefined doppelgänger, East Palo Alto, a predominantly Black neighborhood.
An ingenious composer ing as a bridge between the Bayshore Highwaydivided communities. The Oct. 27, 1968, concert took place just days before an election that included an ultimately unsuccessful initiative to rechristen unincorporated East Palo Alto as Nairobi in honor of Kenya’s capital.
In bringing his band down the Peninsula for a matinee performance before a gig that night at North Beach’s Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, “Thelonious contributed directly to improving race relations during a tense situation,” wrote Robin D. G. Kelley in his biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.”
It’s hard to overstate how chaotic the world had turned during that annus horribilis. The intractable war in Vietnam showed no signs of waning. The massive May protests in France drove President Charles de Gaulle from office and almost toppled the Fifth Republic. Soviet bloc tanks crushed the Prague Spring, and in the U.S., the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy were accompanied by protests and riots.
Scher, who now runs his own production company called DanSun Productions in Berkeley after years as Bill Graham’s righthand man earlier in his career, wanted to present one of his favorite musicians, and he figured attracting fellow jazz fans from East Palo Alto was a good idea.
“I was a newspaper boy for the Palo Alto Times, so I put concert posters in my newspaper bag and I’m riding around East Palo Alto putting them up,” Scher recalled.
On the day of the show, a light rain was falling but “the parking lot was full, and there were lots of folks from East Palo Alto waiting to see what would happen,” Scher said. Then Monk and his band show
up “in our family van driven by my older brother with the bass sticking out of the window. My mom took lunch orders and brought food back for the band after sound check.”
For one afternoon at least, a diverse audience of jazz fans from both sides of the highway came together to share a stellar set by Monk, bassist Larry Gales, drummer Ben Riley and tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse.
The concert’s enduring mystery is the identity of the man who actually recorded the show. Scher said that an African American janitor at the school offered to tune the piano in exchange for permission to record Monk’s set. The album’s imminent release this year sparked a search for his name, but he remains anonymous. (“Our working title for the album credit is ‘Monk’s Recording Custodian,’ ” he said.)
The concert was actually a triple bill that also featured two opening bands wellestablished in the area, the Jimmy Marks AfroEnsemble and Smoke, a collective quintet inspired by Ornette Coleman. Marks, a drummer, poet and owner of the Menlo Park hair salon Markstyle, remembers being thrilled to get the call about the concert.
“I don’t think the band even asked if we were getting paid, that’s how exciting it was,” Marks recalled. Smoke trumpeter Fred Berry, who went on to direct the Stanford Jazz Orchestra for decades until retiring in 2017, didn’t have a chance to talk to Monk himself, but he witnessed a characteristically gnomic exchange with the famously taciturn pianist.
“One young lady asked him if the rain affected the way he played,” Berry said. “He gave her a strange look and said, ‘I hope so.’ ”