The Jazzcat

 

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A Jazz Discovery Adds a New Note to the Historical Record
 By BEN RATLIFF

 You might reasonably think that the recorded past of American music has
been mapped out – that after all the academic books and scholared-up CD
reissues, we know what's between A and Z. Of the important works, anyway.
Ephemera will always keep rolling in, intensifying the reds and golds of the
historical picture, broadening the context.

But now this: tapes bearing nearly a full hour of the Thelonious Monk
quartet with John Coltrane, found at the Library of Congress in January. The
library made the announcement this month.

 The tapes come from a concert at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957, a benefit
for a community center. The concert was recorded by the Voice of America,
the international broadcasting service, and the tapes also include sets by
the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, Ray Charles with a backing sextet, the Zoot
Sims Quartet with Chet Baker, and the Sonny Rollins Trio. (Newspaper
accounts of the concert indicate that Billie Holiday appeared as well,
though she is not on the Voice of America tapes.)

But it is Monk with Coltrane that constitutes the real find. That band
existed for only six months in 1957, mostly through long and celebrated runs
at the East Village club the Five Spot. During this period, Coltrane fully
collected himself as an improviser, challenged by Monk and the discipline of
his unusual harmonic sense. Thus began the 10-year sprint during which he
changed jazz completely, before his death in 1967. The Monk quartet with
Coltrane did record three numbers in a studio in 1957, but remarkably little
material, and only with fairly low audience-tape fidelity, is known to exist
from the Five Spot engagement.

 The eight and a half Monk performances found at the Library of Congress,
by contrast, are professionally recorded, strong and clear; you can hear the
full

dimensions of Shadow Wilson's drum kit and Ahmed Abdul-Malik's bass. It

is certainly good enough for commercial release, though none has yet

been
negotiated.

On the tapes, Monk is Monk, his pianistic style basically formed at least 10
years before, with its sudden drawls and rhythmic hesitations. He lets
Coltrane solo at length with very little accompaniment; the saxophonist
plays rows and rows of original licks and runs, built with blizzards of 16th
notes. The notable exception is Coltrane's solo on “Blue Monk.” Through 10
blues choruses, he builds an even crescendo of logic, letting down his guard
and relying less on his stock phrases. (The other songs on the tape, from
the evening's two sets, are “Monk's Mood,” “Evidence,” “Crepuscule With
Nellie,” “Nutty,” “Epistrophy,” “Bye-Ya,” “Sweet and Lovely” and a truncated second version of “Epistrophy.”)

The music was discovered by accident, during the routine practice of
transferring tape from the Library of Congress's Voice of America collection
to digital sound files for preservation. Larry Appelbaum, a studio engineer,
supervisor and jazz specialist at the library, said that he was given a
batch of about 100 tapes for digitization one day in January and looked to
see what was there; among them he noticed a brown cardboard box for a
7?-inch reel, marked in pencil “sp. Event 11/29/57 carnegie jazz concert
(#1),” with no names on it. It piqued his interest, and one of the boxes
holding the Carnegie tapes – there were eight in all – said “T. Monk.” “It
got my heart racing,” Mr. Appelbaum said. (None of the tape boxes mentioned
Coltrane.)

No bootleg recordings of the concert are known to exist, because even though
it was recorded, it was not broadcast. The Coltrane specialist Lewis Porter
knew of the tape's possible existence and inquired about it years ago, but
after an initial search yielded nothing, Mr. Appelbaum said, he forgot about
it completely. He was surprised to finally find it, of course, but his sense
of surprise has been worn down over the years.

 “There's always more,” Mr. Appelbaum said sagely, in a recent interview in
his recording laboratory at the Library of Congress's recorded sound
division. He repeated the phrase so often during the afternoon that it
became a mantra.

 The Library of Congress holds the country's largest collection of sound
recordings, and jazz of course forms only a tiny part of it. The full extent
of several essential collections is thoroughly cataloged; they include
everything ever recorded at the library's Coolidge Auditorium, including T.
S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell reading their work, chamber music
performances by the Budapest String Quartet, and Jelly Roll Morton singing
and spieling for eight hours in 1938. All of John and Alan Lomax's famous
field recordings are kept there as well.

But among the collections still being cataloged are the 50,000 Voice of
America tapes, which for 40 years have been housed in a dark,
climate-controlled room. The tapes constitute a valuable history of radio,
and

of music in New York. (The Voice of America also recorded every Newport

Jazz Festival from 1955, its second year, to 1976, four years after the

festival relocated from Rhode Island to New York City.) The cataloging

has
proceeded gradually, with first priority given to the most historically
important and most physically fragile material.

Michael Gray, librarian and archivist at the Voice of America, which still
operates out of Washington, confirms that in 1957, and for a long time after
that, the broadcast service had access to the Carnegie Hall Recording
Company's

services. The Voice of America was allowed to record performances at

Carnegie Hall free of charge, without paying the hall or the musicians,

as long as it broadcast only overseas; this was regarded as public

diplomacy through music. Of course, some musicians would not consent to

be recorded, which is probably why there is no Billie Holiday on the

tape.

Besides satisfying jazz fans, the discovery of the Monk tape has Gino
Francesconi, Carnegie Hall's archivist since 1986, excited by the idea that
much

more of the hall's past may be preserved than he thought. “We knew that

Voice of America recorded here,” he said. “But we didn't have any

formal
documentation of it, and it's fantastic to know that they've discovered
this.” There's always more.