I got treated to a little bit of buried treasure (this concert from 1957 didn't see daylight until 2005) on this increasing jazzy week I'm experiencing. It made the drive in the morning much more pleasant and took my mind of watching people get tailgated at 75 mph on 280 while bracing for the possibility of crumpled cars or at least about 1/2 inch of brake padding getting smoked away in about a millisecond.
As I've said a zillion times before, I don't have any kind of magic jazz ear. However, in addition to Bill Evans, I can usually tell when Monk is at the keys. I read somewhere that early critics thought he was mentally deranged because his playing is somewhat discordant at times. Meanwhile, if I tell people I'm listening to Coltrane, I usually need to specify the era in the next breath. Trane was in Monk's boot camp, exiled from the Miles Davis groups of the late 50's, learning new styles and so forth. However, his journeys to Interstellar Space (or just A Love Supreme at least) were still a ways off.
I discovered this through an active collecting of an arbitrary "100 greatest" list, but I've had to work off of an archived list because one day I went to the website and the whole list changed. For instance, this album was demoted from the 40's down to the 110's (the "auxillary" list). Not sure change was good in this particular instance.
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