Twenty years ago, an amazing recording was discovered almost by chance. The Library of Congress was transferring their tape archive to digital formats when Larry Appelbaum, the recording laboratory supervisor, found a recording of the Thelonious Monk Quartet live at Carnegie Hall on November 29, 1957. The show was a benefit for the Morningside Community Center, and the tape was made for the Voice Of America for radio broadcast overseas.

“Among the tapes in a recent batch selected for digitization were eight 10-inch open-reel tapes labeled ‘Carnegie Hall Jazz,’ with the date November 29, 1957,” Appelbaum told Jazz Times in 2005. “The back of one of the tape boxes included a note that said ‘T. Monk.’ When I played it, I recognized Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane playing tenor saxophone. The announcements by Willis Conover from the stage that night confirmed the lineup.”

This was a band — with John Coltrane on tenor sax; Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, taking over for Wilbur Ware; and Shadow Wilson on drums — that existed for less than a year. And Monk and Coltrane recorded together only twice in the studio. The first time was a session in June 1957, for the album Monk’s Music, which also featured fellow tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, trumpeter Ray Copeland, and alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce, with Ware on bass and Art Blakey on drums. The following month, Monk, Coltrane, Ware, and Wilson recorded three tracks: “Ruby, My Dear,” “Trinkle, Tinkle,” and “Nutty.”

These latter tracks sat on the shelf for several years because of label politics, before being rediscovered in 1961 and paired with three outtakes from Monk’s Music and the solo album Thelonious Himself to make up Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane.

Around the same time, the Monk quartet took up a six-month residency at the Five Spot club in lower Manhattan. In 1993, a private tape — recorded by Coltrane’s then-wife Naima — of the band, with Roy Haynes on drums, was released on Blue Note as Discovery!: Live At The Five Spot. It’s raw, but diehard fans found it thrilling.

The VOA recording is something very different: a beautifully recorded document of a band that had long since jelled into a crack unit, delivering at the highest level. It came out, also on Blue Note, on September 27, 2005, as Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane At Carnegie Hall.

They play two sets, adding up to just over 50 minutes of music; they were on a long bill that also included Ray Charles, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Chet Baker. The recording includes performances of “Monk’s Mood,” “Evidence,” “Crepuscule With Nellie,” “Nutty,” “Epistrophy,” “Bye-Ya,” “Sweet and Lovely,” “Blue Monk,” and a second, incomplete “Epistrophy.” It’s interesting that the afternoon and evening sets are completely different, except for “Epistrophy,” which was the band’s finale/theme.

You can tell this is a band that’s been gigging regularly for months. They are locked in on each other. Coltrane plays the tunes like a sprinter hopping from foot to foot at the starting line, waiting for his moment to launch forward. Abdul-Malik is a calming, steady presence at the center of the music. Wilson, not often cited in the top rank of jazz drummers of that era, makes his bid for immortality here; he swings with great force, and the stuff he does on the cymbals at the beginning of the first “Epistrophy” is absolutely killer. And while Monk’s unique melodies and rhythm are at the heart of it all, this is a band and he’s attuned at all times to what everyone else is doing, not merely expecting them to support him.

That said, the selection of tunes makes me think Monk may have been more creatively tuned-in for the first set than the second; it’s a hard-swinging set that really shows the band at their best, especially when they play the through-composed “Crepuscule With Nellie.” Meanwhile, at the evening show, they spend nearly 10 of 25 minutes on a version of the standard “Sweet and Lovely,” and the originals they play are the lesser-known “Bye-Ya” and “Blue Monk.”

In 1962, Thelonious Monk left his longtime label, Riverside, and signed with Columbia Records. They worked hard to make him a household name, and their efforts succeeded, to some degree: he was famously on the cover of Time magazine in 1964. He recorded eight studio albums between 1963 and 1968, but only about 15 new compositions — the rest of the music was either standards, or re-recordings of older material. For this reason, the Columbia years are sometimes regarded as lesser work, the output of an artist whose best years are behind him.

I disagree. I listen to the Columbia albums more often than any other Monk recordings. The steadiness of the relationship between Monk and tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, and their gradually evolving rhythm section — John Ore, Butch Warren, and finally Larry Gales on bass, and Frankie Dunlop on drums, followed by Ben Riley — gives the music a confidence and power that the 1950s recordings, often made under fraught circumstances (read about the Brilliant Corners session sometime), can’t match. They also toured extensively, which brings me to the other album under discussion here today: Bremen 1965.

In the spring of 1965, Monk and his quartet — Rouse, Gales and Riley — embarked on an extended international tour. Between March 4 and April 26, they visited France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. Robin D.G. Kelley’s biography paints it as a somewhat chaotic and not always well-received tour, but he quotes some reviews indicating that the band was tight and capable of great expressivity.

There are plenty of live recordings from 1963, and some from 1964, and a few bootlegs from other dates (Paris, a filmed performance from London), but Bremen 1965, a new double CD from Sunnyside, is a relative rarity as an official document of this tour. The quartet was promoting Monk., his fourth album for Columbia, and they play one song recorded for that album: a version of the standard “Just You, Just Me.” (Monk. only contained two original compositions, “Teo” and “Pannonica,” and he’d recorded “Pannonica” several times in the past.)

The rest of the sets (there are two, each running about 45 minutes) are more or less “greatest hits” shows; they play “Criss-Cross,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Epistrophy” (twice) and “Rhythm-a-Ning,” as well as several more standards Monk favored, like “Sweet and Lovely,” “Don’t Blame Me,” and “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.” On other nights, they apparently played “Four In One” and “Hackensack,” but not here.

The confidence I mentioned above is audible in every note. And it’s immediately noticeable in the lengths to which they stretch the tunes. The first set’s opening version of “Criss-Cross” is 11:15; “Well, You Needn’t” runs 14:25. The second set is even more leisurely — “Just You, Just Me” runs 12:56, “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” is the longest piece on the album at 14:29, and “Rhythm-A-Ning” runs 10:14, followed by a comparatively brief, five-minute “Epistrophy” to bring it all home.

Toward the end of the first set, Monk plays a solo “Don’t Blame Me,” which leads into “Epistrophy,” which he introduces solo. He plays more slowly than he did in 1957, but somehow his timing is identical — the way the phrases breathe are instantly identifiable. And while Rouse doesn’t take off on the kind of lightning-fast runs Coltrane did eight years earlier, his own focus and intensity give the music a blustery energy.

Gales and Riley are a very different rhythm section from Abdul-Malik and Wilson. Gales is a much more active bassist; even his walking lines feel more restless, and he throws in a lot of flourishes and other ways of drawing attention to himself. Plus, he’s louder in the mix; early in the first set, his bass is even slightly distorted, but that’s brought under control quickly. Riley has more of a dancing feel to his swing, and he tosses in some melodic tom accents here and there that remind me of Max Roach.

In 1986, Riley gave an interview to Modern Drummer magazine, in which he talked about playing with Monk. He said in part, “I played two or three different ways in that band until I felt comfortable. Certain tunes dictated that I find another way to interpret the beat. I got more into a Shadow Wilson style of playing later on, because it left a lot of space for the other musicians to do what they wanted, and it didn’t dictate what was happening.”

He also told several stories about Monk’s leadership, including this one: “One night, Rouse, Larry Gales, and I were playing good, stretching out, and having a ball, and Monk was strolling. We were playing on the wrong beat, but we didn’t realize it. We had lost the beat completely, and at first, I think Monk thought that we did it deliberately. Then, after he sat there for a few choruses, he got tired of listening to it. At the beginning of the next chorus, he dropped his hand down on the piano and said, ‘One!’ That was like somebody slapping you in the face.”

There are no such mistakes to be heard on Bremen 1965. This is a band at the peak of its powers — and they’d stay together, with this exact lineup, for three more years. (To hear them at the end of their run, check out the 2020 release Palo Alto, recorded at a high school auditorium in October 1968.) Indeed, as Kelley’s bio reveals, this was Thelonious Monk’s last great band. After Gales and then Riley left, he played with pickup rhythm sections and never put another full-time group together, and his final studio recordings, from 1971, were with bassist Al McKibbon and drummer Art Blakey, with whom he’d been touring Europe as part of a supergroup dubbed the Giants Of Jazz.

Both these albums — the one first released 20 years ago, and the one recorded 60 years ago — are essential listening for Thelonious Monk fans. One is the only known document of a particular group at work, while the other is just a recording of a long-running and well-documented band doing its thing better than you’ve probably ever done anything.

— Phil Freeman