Big Band And Quartet In Concert

Product Description:

Personnel: Thelonious Monk (piano); Steve Lacy (soprano saxophone); Phil Woods (alto saxophone, clarinet); Charlie Rouse (tenor saxophone); Gene Allen (baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, clarinet); Nick Travis (trumpet); Thad Jones (cornet); Eddie Bert (trombone); Butch Warren (bass); Frank Dunlop (drums).

Reissue producer: John Snyder.

Recorded live at Lincoln Center, Philharmonic Hall, New York, New York on December 30, 1963. Includes liner notes by Mark Humphrey.

All tracks have been digitally remastered.

Now available on two CDs, and including over half an hour of additional music (material excised from the original 1964 release), this is a recording of the legendary pianist's December 30, 1963 concert at New York's Lincoln Center. The concert was something of a landmark, and commemorated Monk's transformation from a long-standing controversial figure into a position as an Old Master (Time magazine put his portrait on the cover in early 1964). Quite simply, jazz had caught up to where Monk had been for 20 years. In a world where John Coltrane was developing his sheets of sound technique and people such as Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy were destroying long-held musical boundaries in the genre, Monk's idiosyncratic melodies and playing style, full of long pauses and near-atonal note clusters in the midst of otherwise standard bebop piano solos, simply didn't sound that weird anymore! As a result, this excellent and beautifully recorded concert functions as a long-deserved musical homecoming.