Whoever was filling in for Monk’s wife was out of his managerial depth, resulting in an agreement for Monk to play the High School, no contract, and Monk not being told of the agreement. Sony-Columbia showed their concern by billing Monk the cost of missed studio hours. Monk himself shortly followed and ended up slipping into a coma. It used to be his wife, but she went down with a serious case of the flu that took her out of commission. He sets about organising a jazz concert to be held in the high school auditorium and has his sights set on one of his idols – jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. It just so happened that Scher was head of the International Club on campus and wanted to raise money for the Peace Corps and construction projects in Kenya and Peru. This kid, a jazz lover from the age of ten, who ran the school’s jazz club, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the music, the history, the performers, and a resolute entrepreneurial spirit. They wanted to listen to the likes of Miles Davis take cool by the hand and lead it into the avant-garde.Įxcept for one 16-year-old Jewish kid: Danny Scher, a student of Palo Alto High School. Sure, bop still had it’s die-hard audience, but American music fans wanted their jazz as cool as the war they were fighting with Russia. Individualistic, innovative, constantly refreshing and reinventing himself, Monk was an original composer, like Duke Ellington.īut bebop wasn’t Capital-C Cool in the late sixties. Monk was still playing that bebop jazz – the kind he helped create. Theolonius Monk is nearing the end of his Sony-Columbia contract.
Thelonious Monk ‘Palo Alto’ Album ReviewĬold War America still reeling from the fallout of the MLK and Kennedy assassinations. Let me tell you the story of the long lost jazz record of Theolonius Monk’s Palo Alto.
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