Let me tell you the story of the long lost jazz record of Theolonius Monk’s Palo Alto.
Thelonious Monk ‘Palo Alto’ Album Review
It’s a rainy day in California.
The year is 1968.
Cold War America still reeling from the fallout of the MLK and Kennedy assassinations.
Theolonius Monk is nearing the end of his Sony-Columbia contract. They weren’t treating him too well.
Monk was ill. And running out of money.
Record sales were plummeting.
Monk was still playing that bebop jazz – the kind he helped create. Individualistic, innovative, constantly refreshing and reinventing himself, Monk was an original composer, like Duke Ellington.
But bebop wasn’t Capital-C Cool in the late sixties.
Sure, bop still had it’s die-hard audience, but American music fans wanted their jazz as cool as the war they were fighting with Russia.
They wanted to listen to the likes of Miles Davis take cool by the hand and lead it into the avant-garde.
Except for one 16-year-old Jewish kid: Danny Scher, a student of Palo Alto High School.
This kid, a jazz lover from the age of ten, who ran the school’s jazz club, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the music, the history, the performers, and a resolute entrepreneurial spirit.
It just so happened that Scher was head of the International Club on campus and wanted to raise money for the Peace Corps and construction projects in Kenya and Peru.
So what does this kid do?
He sets about organising a jazz concert to be held in the high school auditorium and has his sights set on one of his idols – jazz pianist Thelonius Monk.
Scher gets ahold of Monk’s manager. It used to be his wife, but she went down with a serious case of the flu that took her out of commission. Monk himself shortly followed and ended up slipping into a coma. Sony-Columbia showed their concern by billing Monk the cost of missed studio hours.
Whoever was filling in for Monk’s wife was out of his managerial depth, resulting in an agreement for Monk to play the High School, no contract, and Monk not being told of the agreement. Meanwhile, Scher sets about plastering advertisements all over town.
Racial tensions were high in California.
Especially around Palo Alto, which had a serious black-white divide.
This was just four years after segregation formally and legally ended, and the same year that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Nobody thought Scher pasting posters with Monk’s black face around a primarily white neighbourhood was a good idea for fear of riling people up.
Scher did it anyway.
At two dollars a ticket, there was initial resistance, but the posters soon drew crowds of jazz fans, money in hand, eager to pack into the auditorium.
Scher felt in his gut that Monk might not turn up, so he got him on the phone and the pianist didn’t even know about the agreement.
Monk came along anyway, brining drummer Ben Riley, tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist Larry Giles, and a hungry belly.
When Monk and his touring band arrived, crowds of black and white faces, an equal mix, was waiting at the high school.
The rain pelted down.
A white woman approached Monk as he waited to go on stage and asked, ‘Does the rain influence your playing?”
Monk’s cryptic reply?
“I hope so.”
Monk was renowned for speaking in riddles.
Surely he didn’t want the concert to be as bleak and miserable as the weather?
Well, there wasn’t a damp mood in the audience.
Rapturous applause greeted the band.
And right before Thelonious and crew broke into an electric performance composed of reinvigorated old favourites, a black janitor, to this day still unknown, approached the stage.
“I’ll tune the piano,” he said. “If you let me record the concert.”
They did.
And that recording sat in a box somewhere for fifty years.
Until this year.
Check out Thelonious Monk’s Palo Alto here.
‘Palo Alto’ album information, with stars beside my favourite tracks:
Side A:
- Ruby, My Dear (7:00)
- Written by Thelonious Monk
- Well, You Needn’t (13:16) *
- Written by Thelonious Monk
Side B:
- Don’t Blame Me (6:36)
- Written by Dorothy Fields & Jimmy McHugh
- Blue Monk (14:02) *
- Written by Thelonious Monk
- Epistrophy (4:26) *
- Written by Thelonious Monk & Kenneth Clarke
- I Love You Sweetheart of All My Dreams (2:02)
- Written by Art Fitch, Kay Fitch & Herbert Lowe