Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall: An Instant Classic

By Chuck Hicks


“I have long thought that there must have been a special affinity between Monk and Coltrane since both were from North Carolina and represented in very different ways, as have almost all important jazz musicians, the combination of high intellect and country soul. Nearly all the greatest men and women are from the country, either below the Mason-Dixon line or from the midwest if not the southwest, which is why blues and blues feeling have always been so essential: they are connectives that speak to the rural and urban underpinnings of the art. The complex mystery of the urban night of concrete and artificial light meetsthe enigma of the arcadian darkness, where tales true

or tall of dragons beneath white sheets, ghosts and spirits seem to loom as strongly as the legends shielded from view by the architecture of the big city.”

 
~Stanley Crouch, from the liner notes to Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
 
Thank goodness for the Library of Congress. After years of supplying the world with archives of seminal roots music recordings, its staff began foraging through reams of old Voice of America acetates. In February of this year (2005) recording lab supervisor Larry Appelbaum came across several reels labeled “Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957.” Included in that stack were originals of a benefit concert held on November 29 of that year for New York’s Morningside Community Center. The bill included Billie Holliday, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk’s quartet featuring John Coltrane. Under the production supervision of T.S. Monk, the latter has been released to the public on the Blue Note label in 24-bit digital transfer. The result is an instant jazz classic not only for the music we hear, but for the critical time frame it captures.
By the early summer of 1957 Thelonious Monk had outlasted his banishment from New York clubs serving alcohol, the result of his questionable arrest, along with Bud Powell, for alleged narcotics possession six years earlier. Being sidelined should have ruined the visionary pianist, and he certainly spent an inordinate amount of time in bed, being awakened by wife Nellie or fellow-musicians who stopped by his apartment long enough to roll over and play a few bars (Monk’s piano positioned next to the bed) to keep the creative juices from coagulating. Oh yes, Monk still played publicly on occasion whenever Nellie would get him up and dressed and push him out the door; the visionary lumbering to the gig on raw instinct like a trained carnival bear. But
Thelonious Monk with wife Nellie and John Coltrane.
for all purposes his public career was in suspended animation, stuck in a protracted malaise that is a death knell for many an artist.

During that same miasmal run, John Coltrane was battling demons within and without. Aside from being slapped around backstage by Miles Davis, Coltrane was hooked on heroin. Strangely, as bop “cooled” through the mid-‘50s and Miles & co. put on a stoic front that simmered below the surface of brewing racial tensions, Coltrane had gotten trapped in the frenetic, Bird-like energy of the half decade before, flittering from fix to fix. Between hits of hooch and horse there was only darkness and living death. Raised in a Christian home in Greensboro, NC, Coltrane had the wherewithal to grasp for a religious solution to his plight, beginning with the music. No longer would he be enslaved to his own nimbleness but would instead pursue a transcendental mastery of composition and phrasing. What Coltrane needed was a kindred spirit, a Socrates to compliment his Plato.

One cannot fully appreciate the dynamics of Monk & Coltrane At Carnegie Hall without stepping back to June of 1957, when the two were finally matched with an all-star cast to record Monk’s Music for the Riverside label, the company whose recording contract had essentially kept Monk viable during his virtual house arrest. Monk’s Music featured the classic cover photo of Monk seated on his son’s little red wagon, wryly juxtaposed to the complex music contained therein. In addition to Monk and Coltrane, the line-up included Ray Copeland (trumpet), Gigi Gryce (alto), established superstar Art Blakey on percussion, and the venerable dean of horn-blowers Coleman Hawkins. Listening to that 1957 sextet amble through the album is like watching the 2004-05 New York Yankees; the mind-boggling talent is nigh collapsing under its own weight. Coltrane made the memorable comparison of those sessions with Monk to “falling down an elevator shaft.” Like a halting A-Rod at bat in the post-season clutch, Coltrane displayed an uncharacteristic reticence; at one point during “Well, You Needn’t,” Monk bellowed out for Coltrane to get with it. Hawkins dealt with the pressure by playing lines that ran comically perpendicular to Monk’s sardonic accompaniment, much the latter’s glee. The only unflappable musician in the studio was Blakey, who alone could stand up to Monk and would actually make the bear play according to his rules on a memorable Atlantic session with the Jazz Messengers a year later. And yet, despite the false starts and nervous overplaying, Monk’s Music stands out as the most compelling of the Riverside recordings. Furthermore it was the launching pad for a summer-long collaboration between Monk and Coltrane that included regular gigs at the Five Spot accompanied by Shadow Wilson on drums and Wilbur Ware on bass - replaced later on by the most lyrical name in jazz, Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Having jammed through the season to a state of impeccable fluidity, it was this quartet which took the stage the evening of November 29, 1957 at Carnegie Hall.
The album is divided into two sessions, the “early show” which began sometime around 8:30 that evening, and the “late show” which took place after midnight. The first set opens with “Monk’s Mood,” one of the first Monk compositions Coltrane learned. The mood is appropriate; the composition slowly and imperceptibly builds along swirling, classical lines that feature only light dashes of accompaniment from Abdul-Malik and Wilson. Primarily this is Monk and Coltrane’s joint statement of rebirth, the reemergence of the titans from their respective spiritual winters. Gone is Coltrane’s hesitancy to tackle Monk’s architectural assignments. From the get-go the Carnegie Hall sessions are marked by a spell-binding familiarity and awareness. As the crowd applauds, the foursome move directly into the difficult “Evidence” (in fact, during both sets the band plays straight through the numbers without pause).

In contrast to Blakey’s propulsive arrangement (Atlantic, ’58), the percussion section here allows the soloists to work out the implications of the jagged piece with surprising ease. Coltrane is still in his “sheets of sound” phase (to quote Ira Gitler) but here his work owes nothing to the urgency of early bop or dope. His rapid-fire execution is a splendid blend of calm detachment and real conviction.

“Crepuscule with Nellie” underscores the effortless economy of the Carnegie Hall recording versus the ponderous takes of the same piece on Monk’s Music. Here, Monk adds a crunching back-beat with his left hand while Coltrane blows the sustained counterpoint with melancholia – a beautifully twisted love song cleverly conceived. One can imagine Monk and his wife sitting silently together in the dimming twilight, communing in a way that defies description (a story is told of how Monk would playfully upset Nellie’s need for order by deliberately nailing pictures on the walls of their apartment at odd angles). One can feel both Nellie’s abiding love and (as Monk himself must have observed) exasperation with her inscrutable man. The question-mark ending to this piece leaves us wondering if we ever really know anyone, especially ourselves.

The real gems on this album are the first two pieces of the “late show” segment. “Bye-ya” is Monk at his most relaxed and playful, and the applause at the end of his solo the only one he receives with the crowd generally mesmerized by Coltrane’s pyrotechnics. This swinging piece showcases Shadow Wilson’s expert cymbal work and occasional polyrhythmic flourishes, and with Monk playing “in the cracks” so to speak, the percussion becomes a lead instrument without the need of being granted a solo. Next comes a typically obtuse Monk interpretation of a standard, “Sweet and Lovely,” loaded with Monk’s signature waterfall runs and insertion of odd chords to punctuate lines. And yet, the smoothness and tightness of the quartet is never lost, even with a surprising tempo shift into overdrive at the five minute mark.

The last complete track on the album is a return to roots as Monk and Coltrane cruise through “Blue Monk.” Coltrane and Monk were both native Tar Heels, the former being born in Hamlet and raised in Greensboro, the latter hailing from Rocky Mount. Gospel and blues made up their earliest, formative musical experiences; as a youth Monk even played piano for an evangelist at revival meetings in New York. With a closing blues number they seem to suggest that regardless of how far the aphelion of their creative orbits extended, they would always come home, so to speak. But while their rural backgrounds certainly informed their music, the truth is neither were ever quite the same after that magical night at Carnegie Hall. True, Coltrane would go on greater heights with “My Favorite Things” and A Love Supreme, to name a few. But Carnegie Hall marked the beginning of a tragically short-lived chapter of “clean” Coltrane. Within a few years he would exchange the kick of heroine for the “enlightenment” of LSD. His music in the latter days of his truncated life would become, as Wynton Marsalis correctly noted, “unlistenable.”

As for Monk, he remained Monk. The ‘60s would deliver him from obscurity, land him on the cover of Time and establish his steady collaboration with Charlie Rouse. But like A-Rod and Derek Jeter, the amiable relationship produced little – Monk dried up as a composer and faded quietly into the crepuscule. Regardless, Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall arguably reflects the zenith of two careers in harmonious conjunction.

And to think that Jack Kerouac’s similarly delayed masterpiece On the Road came out the same year. Talk about your planets aligning…