Monk’s Palo Alto High gig unearthed
The most astounding jazz album of 2020 is the handiwork of an ambitious 16yearold high school senior from Palo Alto.
The quartet of legendary pianistcomposer Thelonious Monk has never sounded better than on “Palo Alto,” which features music recorded live during Monk’s stop in the Bay Area city in the fall of 1968. The album is scheduled for release July 31 on Impulse Records, Universal Music announced Friday, June 19.
The unlikely concert came about due to the precocious machinations of Danny Scher, who was taking his first steps toward his future role as rock impresario Bill Graham’s righthand man.
“Jazz was my thing, but I wasn’t old enough to get into the Jazz Workshop,” says Scher, referring to the storied North Beach jazz club where Monk’s quartet performed regularly through the ’60s. “I was in the International Club at Palo Alto High, and we wanted to do a fundraiser for it.”
So Scher contacted Monk’s manager and arranged for the pianist’s quartet to headline a triple bill at the Paly High Auditorium on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 27, 1968, while the band was in the midst of a run at the Jazz Workshop. Tickets were $2.
Featuring tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist Larry Gales and drummer Ben Riley, all of whom are now deceased, Monk’s band was a formidable unit that was well documented over four years of steady work. But no previous live album rendered the quartet swinging with such joyous power.
Born in North Carolina and raised in the Upper West Side neighborhood of San Juan Hill, Monk (191782) was a principal architect of modern jazz. Adapting the twohanded Harlem stride piano style to his own sly and gnomic image, he honed a body of some 70 compositions that has proved endlessly resilient and enduringly revelatory, cementing his status as one of the 20th century’s most important composers.
“Palo Alto” doesn’t shed new light on his genius so much as provide a thrilling, unusually immediate experience of his musical world. The concert was preserved by an audiophile janitor who asked to record the event in exchange for tuning the piano. Scher can’t remember the man’s name, but he did exemplary work on both fronts, capturing the concise 47minute set with enviable clarity.
Monk plays four of his betterknown compositions, opening with his voluptuous ballad “Ruby, My Dear.” In between a 13minute romp through “Well, You Needn’t” and an epic 14minute version of “Blue Monk,” he delivers a striding solo rendition of the Jimmy McHugh/ Dorothy Fields standard “Don’t Blame Me,” the piano bench creaking audibly in the background. Monk closes the performance with a brief solo take of the obscurity “I Love You (Sweetheart of All My Dreams),” a tune he’d recorded four years earlier on “Monk,” the Columbia album that introduced this quartet.
The reeltoreel tape sat in a box with the Palo Alto concert program in Scher’s BGP office for decades before he got in touch with Monk’s son, drummer T.S. Monk. The Monk estate authorized several concert albums before the release of “Palo Alto,” but T.S. Monk believes the recording captures his father at his only high school performance, which might explain the music’s exuberance.
“The energy is very high,” Scher says. “Apparently, Monk had a great time.”