Tag: charlesrouse

Thelonious Monk, Mønk

A recently discovered live recording of Monk’s greatest quartet in their prime.

Album of the Week, July 26, 2025

Thelonious Monk recorded his final record for Columbia, Underground, in 1968, following several live albums and Solo Monk. While the record featured a number of new compositions, it marked an end rather than a revitalization. By the early 1970s, Monk was done, having made a handful of recordings on smaller labels. He retired for health reasons, having been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and prescribed medications that made him uncommunicative.1 He spent the last six years of his life as a guest of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, dying of a stroke in 1982. So his would seem an unlikely wellspring in which to find a source of new recordings.

But, just as new Coltrane tapes have been turning up in odd places, so a few significant Monk recordings have surfaced in the last few years. An improbable session booked by a 16-year-old high school student and taped by the high school’s janitor, Palo Alto captured the final known performance of Monk’s last quartet with Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales and Ben Riley. And a 1963 live recording from the Odd Fellows Palaeet in Copenhagen surfaced on tapes rescued from a dumpster yields today’s album, a rare live document of his greatest quartet with Rouse, bassist John Ore, and drummer Frankie Dunlop. Together they had recorded two great sessions for Columbia; they were in the middle of sessions for Criss-Cross at the time of this concert, but Monk’s Dream had just been released, so three of the tracks come from those sessions.

“Bye-Ya,” one of the Monk’s Dream tracks, had a long simmer in Monk’s book of compositions, having been recorded for Prestige on Thelonious Monk Trio in 1952. The tune is a 32-bar Latin tune, originally titled “Go”; when producer Bob Weinstock wanted a name with more of a Latin feel, Monk literally translated it, called it “Vaya,” which became “Bye-Ya” in his inimitable dialect. The performance here starts out with a syncopated explosion from Dunlop, who had previously recorded with Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, and Duke Ellington, among others. Monk enters on a two note pattern while Rouse states the melody, and then we’re off to the races with a brilliant contrafact from the saxophonist over two verses. Despite his reputation for eccentricity, Monk is tight here with the rhythm section, the whole unit performing with a snap and flair. There’s no sense of the mountain-climbing hard labor that characterized Brilliant Corners; Rouse, Dunlop and Ore knew this material like the backs of their hands, so they provide a sense of ease and delight as they stretch out through the material. Monk’s own soloing is similarly relaxed and joyous, at one point embracing an off-the-beat series of staccato exclamations that fit naturally with the rest of the tune.

“Nutty” also originated on Thelonious Monk Trio and had last been recorded on Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane in 1957, but was a staple of Monk’s live sets. Monk opens with a jaunty statement of the melody, and then Rouse is off to the races, playing brisk double-time runs over bursts of chords from Monk and a constant support from Ore and Dunlop. The bassist, who would go on to play with Sun Ra, gives a dry walking bass that touches the corners of Monk’s unusual chords and then walks off into other neighboring dimensions, all while keeping things tightly anchored. Monk’s solo breaks apart the bits of the tune; he finds a five-note pattern and holds onto it, repeating it four times against the changing chords. The last of his solo is sketched in bare chords that leave most of each measure open, allowing Ore’s bass and the pops and booms of Dunlop’s drums to show through.

While his own tunes show little of the stride piano that tinges his playing of Ellington and his later performance on Solo Monk, it raises its head on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”; presumably he reserved the technique for the compositions of others, like this 1932 tune written for Tommy Dorsey by George Bassman and Ned Washington. There’s very little sentimentality in Rouse’s solo, which takes off at high speed and gives us a briskly virtuosic tour through the corners of the tune. Monk’s solo eases off on the Fats Waller influence, giving a more modern be-bop take on the tune, complete with a descending line that sounds rather like someone coming down the stairs sideways.

The great classic “Body and Soul,” also appearing on Monk’s Dream, here gets a rubato solo take by Monk that plays some chordal adjacencies and re-voicings, as well as some of the chromatic vamps that make for some of the most distinctive Monk sounds in his own compositions. The subsequent verses are done in strict time, though some of Monk’s improvisations play against the beat in a way that threaten to unravel the momentum. Just as one begins to fear that we’re stuck in the offbeat eternally, Monk clicks the melody back into time, rewarding the listener with a breathtaking glissando. It’s a fine performance that would have shone on Solo Monk.

“Monk’s Dream” headlines the album of the same name, but its origins also go back to Thelonious Monk Trio. The chord progression threatens to make the listener’s ears cross-eyed, as it were, but the quartet makes it sound easy, with brisk rolls from Dunlop punctuating each phrase of the song. Monk plays a series of leading tones under Rouse, leading to a feeling of instability in the tune and a feeling that Rouse is about to come unmoored and play away into some other song. But as they continue to play the connection reiterates itself and the wooziness is revealed to be deliberate. Rouse plays the last verse of his solo without Monk; without the chords it’s easier to hear Rouse’s conception of the melody. When Monk returns, he brings back the leading tone patterns and then slowly builds a solo around them, exploring outward chromatically, anchoring one entire verse of the solo a defiant tone away from the tonic. Indeed, the performance might serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone to his overall conception of melody, as he digs into everything but the tonic, finding joy in the adjacencies of tone.

Mønk is part of a wave of newly discovered jazz tapes that threaten to swamp the listener in an embarrassment of riches—and might seem to threaten the efforts of newer players. After all, why seek out the recordings of a Tyshawn Sorey or Linda May Han Oh when another lost recording from Coltrane, Monk or Bill Evans beckons? The answer, of course, is “¿Porque no los dos?” And there’s some truly fantastic material being recorded today (though not often being released on vinyl, which limits how much of it I’ll write about in this series). Next week we’ll start listening to different performers on the same (groovy) instrument in recordings that stretch from

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: 1963 was busy for Monk and his quartet. A less pristine tape capturing a performance in Stockholm by the group was released as the bootleg Live in Stockholm 1963, and it’s worth a listen as well.

  1. This may have contributed to some of Monk’s reputation for eccentricity. Or it could just have been his style. The saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who was up and coming in the late 1960s, tells a story about being on tour with Monk in which the great man danced around Lloyd’s dressing room between sets and, despite a plea from Pannonica, drank an entire pitcher of orange juice because Lloyd told him it was “tainted.” ↩︎

Marcus Roberts, The Truth is Spoken Here

A debut album for a remarkable performer and a seriously talented ensemble, and a perfectly lovely set of straight-ahead jazz.

Album of the Week, May 10, 2025

Some young artists get their start playing with other young artists, and their eventual first record captures them coming up together as a unit. That’s usually the way it goes with rock and pop artists; jazz has often been another story. The first recordings of artists like Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and others put the young lions in combination with older, more experienced players. You can especially see this on Blue Note Records. Alfred Lion’s trick accomplished a few things: it provided the young player with backup from players who had more experience recording and playing, who could challenge them improvisationally; but it also ensured that there was a certain continuity of sound between the new player’s album and the others on the label—or more generally in that generation of sound.

I don’t know if the Blue Note model was on the mind of Delfeayo Marsalis, who produced Marcus Roberts’ debut session as a leader, The Truth is Spoken Here. But the band assembled for the session followed the model, combining some new players with the proponents of the “house sound”—the Wynton Marsalis combo—and a few veterans. Alongside Roberts were his erstwhile bandleader Wynton (on three tracks), bassist Reginald Veal and tenor saxophonist Todd Williams (on two tracks) who were both to begin performing with Wynton’s band, Charlie Rouse (appearing on three tracks, best known for his long collaboration with Thelonious Monk), and Elvin Jones, who had spent the years since his collaborations with John Coltrane leading his own combos. The choice of veterans must have been a deliberate choice; Roberts wore his indebtedness to Monk on his sleeve, and the influence of Trane’s pianist McCoy Tyner cast a long shadow over his playing as well.

The first track, “The Arrival,” demands close listening to get the exciting bits; I recommend headphones because Jones is an extremely vocal player, and hearing his grunts as the band plays through Roberts’ composition makes it come alive in a way that the playing (sadly) doesn’t. We’re hearing Wynton in his Miles phase, playing through a Harman mute, and while the tone is impeccable the whole solo feels like it happens all on one level, with little variation in intensity. Roberts gives the other players a lot of space, primarily letting Wynton, Elvin, and Reginald Veal drive the development of the track during Wynton’s solo. Veal is eye-opening here; his bass lines are acrobatic, but he’s not content just to walk them; we get rhythmic variation and counter-melody from him as well as some suspensions that build tension. When Roberts takes his own solo we start to hear a little more flash. There’s some stride in his playing in the way the left hand shifts the beat, and some Liszt around the edges of his chord voicings. You can hear the debt to Tyner in the harmonic vocabulary, but the touch (particularly when Wynton plays) is lighter. The outro for Elvin Jones is a shot of adrenaline even without the great drummer’s grunts signaling the beats.

If the opening showed what Roberts could do in a group context, “Blue Monk” is pure solo, and offers him the chance to really show off. He takes the Monk standard to church: while the opening is pure Monk, once he gets past the head we get some gospel around the edges, and more than a hint of the blues and ragtime that are always just under the corners of any Monk composition—especially what those left hand chords do to the time as he shifts freely from 4/4 to 6/4. It’s way more interesting than what he played on the first track; one wants more of it.

“Maurella” is another Roberts original, and it has the marks of the compositional direction he brought to his time in the Wynton Marsalis group on albums like J Mood: a series of suspended chords, taken so slowly in the head that it almost feels out of time, that ultimately fail to resolve. Roberts loved these chord suspensions so much that you can hear traces of them in other tracks, including the title track on the second side. In this setting, the progression seems to open up melancholy vistas behind the melodic trail blazed by Todd Williams, a tenor player from St. Louis who would spend about ten years in Wynton’s band and related projects before withdrawing from jazz performance to take the music director role at the Times Square Church. His tone is well suited for this work; he sells the odd chord progressions but doesn’t do much showy improvisation. There’s sensitive accompaniment from Jones and Veal throughout.

“Single Petal of a Rose” is the second solo number by Roberts, this time paying homage to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. He plays the Strayhorn composition with delicacy and nuance, but with a power in the left hand that gives the work a deep dynamic range. When he gets to the bridge, you can almost get swept away on the wave of impassioned music making that pours out of the piano. Like “Blue Monk,” this one also leaves you wanting more of his solo work.

When we flip to the second side, we have shifted gears again and are in a straight-ahead post-bop number. “Country by Choice” features Charlie Rouse. Rouse played as Monk’s sideman from 1959 through 1969, including on some of the most famous Columbia Records recordings (Criss Cross, Monk’s Dream, It’s Monk’s Time, Straight, No Chaser). Here on more straightforward harmonic material he tempers some of his more eccentric harmonic tendencies, but he still brings a big tenor sound to the party. Roberts’ solo feels a little tentative through bits of the middle; he’s on firmer ground when he shifts the meter to something more syncopated and shouting, and Veal and Jones follow him the whole way. We get a shouting, snarling solo from Jones to bring us through into the recap, and Veal and Jones bring us out into a coda.

“The Truth is Spoken Here” brings the chord progressions first heard on “Maurella” to a quintet voicing with the addition of Wynton’s trumpet. Wynton takes a good deal more rubato than was present in the earlier iteration of the tune, and plays off Todd Williams’ high tenor notes with aplomb. This time Roberts takes the first solo, and his anticipatory downbeats combined with Jones’ growl lighten up the proceedings considerably compared to the earlier song. The trio cooks its way through the end of the solo and into the reprise. It’s a great performance, lessened only by the puzzling near-repetition on the first side of the record.

“In a Mellow Tone” brings back Rouse for a seriously swinging run at the Ellington classic, and the combination of Rouse’s tenor and Jones’ vocalizing recall nothing so much as the collaboration between Ellington and Coleman Hawkins that produced “Limbo Jazz” (particularly the echo of Aaron Bell’s spontaneous vocals on the latter tune). Veal stays particularly tight in the pocket, letting Roberts unspool melodic lines and shifts of rhythmic emphasis against an always-solid metrical backbone.

“Nothin’ but the Blues” gives us a staggering blues, with a tricky triple meter laid over the traditional twelve bar form. This track is the only time that I’m aware that Rouse and Wynton collaborated (Rouse would pass away only five months after this session, his last, was completed), and their off-kilter harmonic imaginations light up sparks on the head. Roberts may have called this “nothing but the blues,” but there’s more than a little Monk in it too, particularly in his solo, which gets more interestingly ornery the longer it goes. Wynton’s solo straightens out some of the brilliant corners, but it’s a more committed improvisational gesture than on the rest of the record, and it pairs well with Rouse’s sly around-the-corner elaboration of the chords. The outro gives each of the players a plausible claim to having gotten the last word.

As a debut album, The Truth is Spoken Here does a good job of showcasing Roberts as a performer, particularly in the two solo numbers and “In a Mellow Tone.” It’s less good at showcasing his compositional skills, but does a great job of highlighting his influences and demonstrating how his gospel, soul and classical background helped his perfoming conception transcend those influences. Like a good Blue Note album, the end result is a great listen, if not groundbreaking. As for his composition, the follow-up album would show a much broader range of his talents. We’ll hear that one in a bit; next time we’ll hear a different musician tackle traditional repertoire alongside a storied collaborator.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: With Wynton guesting on the album and given their close working relationship in his small group, it was only natural that some of Roberts’ originals would end up on a Wynton album. The title track appeared on Wynton’s 1991 album Uptown Ruler in a quintet performance: