Consumer Guide Album

Thelonious Monk: Palo Alto [Impulse, 2020]
No Coltrane-at-Carnegie coup but with plenty more to offer than, for instance, 2017's Les Liaisons Dangereuses "soundtrack," this 37-minute Sunday-afternoon high school gig squeezed into a three-week 1968 San Francisco club run is one of the Great One's more distinct live albums, not least because it showcases his late-life band, which by spurring tenor henchman Charlie Rouse with lithe bassist Larry Gales and deft drummer Ben Riley was also his sprightliest. The sound is so crisp it's hard to believe it was recorded on a janitor's tape machine (a treasured Webcor, I bet), capturing not just how muscular his touch is on "Ruby My Dear" and how scalar his comping is on "Blue Monk" but how enthusiastically he grunts his enjoyment of Gales's bowed solo. Rouse's brisk, angular "Blue Monk" solo doesn't top 'Trane's at Carnegie but cuts his own Paris and Newport efforts. And while Ethel Waters's "Don't Blame Me" has never been my favorite Monk standard, a nostalgic yet discordant minute-plus of Rudy Vallee's "I Love You Sweetheart of All My Dreams" is an aptly cockeyed way to bid the kids goodbye. A-