Thelonious Monk: Thelonious Alone In San Francisco [ORIGINAL JAZZ CLASSICS]

Why you'll love it

This Original Jazz Classics pressing presents the Riverside album in stereo, pressed in the EU. It catches Monk entirely on his own, mixing six of his compositions with four standards.

This edition

• Original Jazz Classics series
• Stereo mix
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Most piano albums get made in a studio; this one was made in an empty hall. On October 21 and 22, 1959, producer Orrin Keepnews and engineer Reice Hamel set Thelonious Monk down at a piano in San Francisco's Fugazi Hall, and simply let him play. It was his third solo album, after his Paris session of 1954 and Thelonious Himself in 1957.

Monk mixes his own tunes with old popular songs. "Blue Monk" and "Ruby, My Dear" get loving, unhurried readings, "Pannonica" is named for his friend and patron, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, and "Reflections" closes the album. "Bluehawk" and "Round Lights" are improvised blues that exist in these recordings and nowhere else. The standards come from Irving Berlin's "Remember," Matt Dennis's "Everything Happens To Me," "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Heart" and "There's Danger In Your Eyes, Cherie," all bent gently into Monk's own angular shape. Keepnews wrote the liner notes.

It is about as close as a record gets to having Monk in the room, the space around every note doing half the talking. He played to an empty hall, which, judging by our Tuesday mornings, is a jazz tradition that never quite went away.

Also at Kops: more Thelonious Monk on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Riverside / Original Jazz Classics (cat# OJC-231), a reissue of the 1959 album.