Discovery of the Lost John Coltrane/Thelonious Monk Quartet Recording with Larry Appelbaum and Francis Davis in Philadelphia

Please join us for this unique public discussion featuring Library of Congress' Larry Appelbaum and Village Voice critic Francis Davis, who will address the remarkable discovery and impact of the historically significant concert tapes featuring the legendary jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and iconic saxophonist John Coltrane.

One of the most historically important working bands in all of Jazz history, the Monk/Coltrane Quartet was both short-lived and, until recently, thought to be frustratingly under-recorded. The concert, which took place at the famed Carnegie Hall in New York City on November 29, 1957, was preserved on tapes made by Voice of America for a later radio broadcast that were located at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

Monk and Coltrane had been working together for a solid four months by the time they set foot on stage at Carnegie Hall that night. By all accounts, Coltrane had been tentative early on in the Five Spot run, challenged at first by Monk's quirky melodies and chord changes, but the 51 minutes of music captured on this tape (now released by Blue Note Records) presents the quartet, which was completed by bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik and drummer Shadow Wilson, at the height of their powers.

The tapes from that evening at Carnegie Hall were inadequately labeled, filed away amongst the Voice of Americas vast collection of recordings, and apparently forgotten until January 2005 when Larry Applebaum, a supervisor and jazz specialist at the Library of Congress, came upon them by accident during the routine process of digitally transferring the Librarys collection for preservation purposes. Applebaum noticed a set of tapes simply labeled “sp. Event 11/29/57 carnegie jazz concert (#1)", with one of the tapes barring the sole marking “T. Monk." Until now, remarkably little recorded documentation of Monks quartet with Coltrane has been known to exist, a fact that makes this finding all the more significant.