Palo Alto

About

In 1968, an enterprising high school student named Danny Scher got the notion to invite Thelonious Monk to come play at Palo Alto High School in Northern California. Scher’s ambitions were big: Not only did he want to bring one of the greatest minds in modern jazz to a high school, but he hoped that such a show might foster racial goodwill between the mostly white community of Palo Alto and the mostly Black community of neighboring East Palo Alto. Released more than 50 years after its initial recording (made by the school’s hobbyist-audio-engineer janitor, no less), <i>Palo Alto</i> isn’t just a bright spot from a dark national moment (including the shootings of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy), it’s one of the best live recordings in Monk’s catalog, as good a single-serving testament to his wit and genius as exists. The perception at the time was that Monk was on the downslope, a vibrant eccentric whose mix of old-time charm and modern dissonance was being eclipsed by the radicalism of younger—or, in the case of contemporaries like Miles and Coltrane, more strident—players. Listening back now, though, the sense is of an artist sticking to his guns, changing not with the times so much as with the winds blowing inside his own private world. Performed with Monk’s longest-running quartet (tenor Charlie Rouse, bassist Larry Gales, and drummer Ben Riley), the music here is relaxed but lived-in, a survey of some of Monk’s best-known—and best-loved—material executed with a back-of-the-hand intimacy that gives way to startling improvisation. Listen to the clarity of Gales’ bowed solo on “Well, You Needn’t” (a feat, given the tempo) or the way Monk evolves from old-fashioned stride to jarring pointillism on “Blue Monk”: Here was a dialogue between tradition and evolution, as funny, lively, and contentious as any dialogue between warring parties with something at stake. Danny Scher graduated, of course, though after something like booking Monk, he likely had big plans on the horizon. As for Monk, he was never particularly political, but you have to wonder what he meant when he ended <i>Palo Alto</i> by saying, “We have to get to work. We have to hurry back and get to work, you dig?”

via Apple Music