RISE UP:

The boxed set was made under the aegis of Orrin Keepnews (who died in March, at the age of ninety-one), the producer and the co-founder of the Riverside label, who, as a critic in the late forties, was among the first to recognize Monk's genius. In 1955, he succeeded in poaching him from another record company, where his albums were unappreciated and his place on the roster was subordinate. Recordings were especially important to Monk at the time because, as a result of trumped-up drug charges, he had lost his cabaret card (in effect, a New York City performance license) and couldn't play in any venue that served alcohol--i.e., jazz clubs.

In the set's copious booklet, Keepnews discusses his plan for establishing the modernist Monk--namely, by making explicit his ties to jazz tradition. He recorded the Monk trio playing compositions by Duke Ellington, in 1955, and followed that album early the next year with one of the trio performing standards from what wasn't yet called the Great American Songbook. Those albums offer delightful shocks, such as the "Name That Tune" trouble that Monk so gleefully provokes with his radical rearrangements of familiar melodies. His revision of "Mood Indigo" seemingly puts more notes into the first phrase than Ellington's whole composition contains. He reharmonizes Fats Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose" nearly to the breaking point and plays exuberantly with "Tea for Two," toying with its simple melody to tease out a comically obsessive syncopation.

In October, 1956, Keepnews had Monk throw down a wild gauntlet of compositional and organizational audacity, "Brilliant Corners," featuring the saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Ernie Henry and the drummer Max Roach. In his notes, Keepnews details the trouble that the complex title tune caused the musicians, and the editing tricks that gave rise to the released performance. This recording has a grand, grave sense of moment: it is a coming out of the composer from behind the mask of eccentricity and idiosyncrasy and displaying, in several difficult and expansive works, his thoroughgoing and large-scale musical imagination, even within the relative intimacy of a quintet. [...]

Monk made his drummers--and, for that matter, almost all of his musicians--rise to the occasion. For me, the most exhilarating of these occasions is the series of recordings issued on the album titled "Monk's Music," from June, 1957, featuring Coltrane, Hawkins, and, in particular, Blakey, who displays a scintillating synergy with the pianist. Blakey drives the band with an astonishingly contained heat that is tempered with lyricism--his accompanying accents are witty and melodic, and his solos are the most singable, witty ones that I've ever heard. The entire band is electrified. Coltrane wasn't yet the meteoric inventor that he'd become after his six-month stint with Monk at the Five Spot, but his sound is searching, his tense rhythms and broken phrases pregnant with far-reaching ideas. Hawkins, who more or less single-handedly turned the tenor sax into a jazz soloist's heavy weaponry in the nineteen-twenties, is roaring, robust, and good-humored. The bassist Wilbur Ware, with his uniquely percussive tone, does some remarkable duets with Blakey, and the trumpeter Ray Copeland, who didn't record often, displays a tone that veers between brazenly bright and intimately grainy for his concise, poised solos. I consider it Monk's single greatest studio recording.

Follow @brothersjudd