Monk, Coltrane and the Missing Link in the History of Jazz

The quartet existed less than six months, and, except for those of us who heard it live, it was pretty much forgotten for 50 years. Until January, when Larry Appelbaum of the Recorded Sound Division at the U.S. Library of Congress was preparing a batch of Voice of America tapes for digitalization and got curious.

He opened a minimally and ambiguously labeled plain white box holding a reel of tape. Listening to it, he recognized Monk and Coltrane, and he heard that the sound quality was excellent. Appelbaum recalls, by e-mail, that his heart “began to race."

My heart raced to the same music for most of the summer of 1957. I had sublet a loft from a painter on Second Avenue, and the Five Spot café, one block away on the Bowery, became my New York locale. In residence there, Monk and Coltrane and the same band that would play Carnegie Hall three months later were making the most dynamic, original, and charismatic jazz music since Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in 1945.

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