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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Rolling Stone has an article about a concert tape with an interesting back story [rollingstone.com]. The album, Thelonious Monk: Live at Palo Alto eventually came out in September 2020. It was a recording of when the jazz legend played at a high school back in 1968. The school custodian recorded the show on reel to reel. When the tape resurfaced not too many years ago, it drew the ire of and some dirty tricks from a former record label.

The greatest lost concert in American history almost never happened at all. It was Oct. 27, 1968, in Palo Alto, California. Outside of his high school, Danny Scher, a 16-year-old, bushy-haired, jazz-obsessed, self-described “weirdo,” was pacing the parking lot waiting for his hero, and music’s most elusive and enigmatic genius, to show up: composer and pianist Thelonious Monk [rollingstone.com].

To the disbelief of most everyone — including his mother and girlfriend waiting alongside him — Scher claimed to have booked the jazz legend for an afternoon gig, the modern equivalent of securing Kendrick Lamar for prom. Pulling this off at a nearly all-white school during his racially divided town’s explosive Civil Rights battle — when the predominantly Black community of East Palo Alto was fighting to rename itself “Nairobi” — made it even more unlikely. But the mixed crowd in the parking lot proved how music could bring them together. “It was really the only time I ever remember seeing that many Black people,” Scher recalls. “Everyone was just there to see Monk.”

Fortunately Monk’s contract with the label had expired in 1967, a year before the Palo Alto High School show, but the rip off attempts by the label almost derailed the release.

Previously:
(2024) Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” at 100 [soylentnews.org]
(2019) The Internet Saved the Record Labels [soylentnews.org]

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