The quartet began its extended Five Spot stay in July, and within weeks was being hailed as the greatest meeting of jazz minds since Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Needing his own ensemble for the gig, Monk recruited Coltrane, Ware and, when first-choice drummer Frankie Dunlop proved unavailable due to lack of a union card, Shadow Wilson. The club willing to hire and in effect vouch for Monk was the Five Spot, a bar in Cooper Square that had become a popular hangout for poets and painters after initiating a music policy featuring bands led by Cecil Taylor and David Amram.
Two months later, Monk gave Coltrane the rare opportunity to blow alongside tenor saxophone patriarch Coleman Hawkinson Monk’s subsequent Riverside album, Monk’s Music.īetween the two albums, Monk finally won back his cabaret card on the condition that he find work in one of the city’s clubs. The saxophonist’s entrance halfway through “Monk’s Mood,” after 40 minutes of otherwise unaccompanied piano, is one of the great dramatic moments of the LP era. Also, I could see a lot of things that I didn’t know about at all.” – John Coltrane, Down Beat 1960īy April, Coltrane had earned enough of the pianist’s confidence for Thelonious Monk to include him (along with bassist Wilbur Ware) as surprising curtain-call participants on the album Thelonious Himself. I could watch him play and find out the things that I wanted to know. I would talk to Monk about musical problems, and he would sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them. “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order I felt I learned from him in every way – through the senses, theoretically, technically. Maybe.” – John ColtraneĬoltrane had already recorded his most dramatic and influential early solo on Davis’s version of “Round Midnight,” and his fascination with Monk’s music only grew as he struggled to put his life in order. he would stop and show me some parts that were pretty difficult, and if I had a lot of trouble, well, he’d get his portfolio out show me the music. I’d go by his apartment, and get him out of bed - he’d wake up and roll over to the piano and start playing. “We’d already recorded one song, ‘Monk’s Mood,’ and I liked it so well,” So he invited me around, then I started learning all of his tunes. In early 1957 Coltrane began visiting the Monk household. Coltrane saw this as a spur to rid himself of a longstanding heroin habit, but his attempt to go cold turkey while continuing to work, and the alcohol dependence that followed as he drank to ease the pain of withdrawal, left him in such disheveled shape that Davis fired him. After a decade of unnoticed employment with Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Hodges and Earl Bostic, the saxophonist had finally attracted attention as the aggressive, complex contrast to Miles Davis in the trumpeter’s first immortal quintet. John Coltrane’s issues had more to do with health. A scarcity of work under his own name led Monk uncharacteristically to record as a sideman with Sonny Rollins and as a guest with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. His irregularly-employed working band had dissolved late in 1956 when alto saxophonist Ernie Henry joined Dizzy Gillespie and the absence of a necessary cabaret card, which had been revoked after a questionable drug conviction in 1951, meant that Monk could not be employed in Manhattan night clubs. Yet two obstacles stood in the way of even greater acclaim for his music.
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His Riverside Records contract, plus reissues of older work by Blue Note and Prestige in the new “long playing” format, brought renewed attention to his music, and his third Riverside collection, Brilliant Corners, was hailed as his magnum opus upon its release. Monk’s challenges can be seen as work-related. The year 1957 brought two of the music’s Olympian figures together in collaboration, a year that, for distinct reasons, was pivotal in each man’s life. Thelonious Monk’s music had been played already before Trane with different saxophonists, but I think Trane was more precise, He was more careful about learning things exactly like Monk meant…” – Tommy Flanagan In Jazz History 1957 belongs to “In John Coltrane, Monk found an analytical brother - a musician who shared in his intellectual approach and remained true to the sound and structure of his music.
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