Original Album Plus Bonus Tracks!

Recorded in the spring of 1957 but not released until four years later, Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane was instantly hailed as one of the greatest achievements in either musician's career. When Monk and Trane spent six months of 1957 working together at New York's Five Spot Cafe, it was an historic event which certainly should have been exhaustively recorded. But nonmusical conflicts made that impossible, leaving as the only permanent reminders of this momentous encounter the three remarkable quartet selections that highlight this album. Orrin Keepnews, producer of the original recording suggests that "one way of looking at the sudden acceptance of these two previously much underappreciated but - as we have now all known for a full half-century - truly monumental artists, might be simply to accept their triumph as an incredibly important idea whose time had now suddenly arrived." This reissue from Vinyl Passion augments the original album with a pair of bonus tracks ("Monk's Mood," "Crepuscule With Nellie").