One night in late February 1959, Thelonious Monk took a tentet to Town Hall in New York City for a historic concert. No one had heard Monk’s music played by a big band before. The anticipation was great. For several weeks leading up to that event Monk and his collaborator Hall Overton, and then the entire band, toiled away arranging and rehearsing the music in a dilapidated loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue (between 28th and 29th Streets). 

Fifty years later, two generations of jazz stars pay homage to Monk at Town Hall. Charles Tolliver and Jason Moran salute the legendary musician by presenting two distinct, evening-length takes on that original concert. Tolliver and his tentet play newly minted note-for-note arrangements of the 1959 show, while Moran and his octet present a newly commissioned mixed-media concert that incorporates never-before-heard recordings and images captured during the rehearsals and arranging sessions by legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith, who lived and worked in the “jazz loft” building.




FEBRUARY 26, 2009
THE THELONIOUS MONK ORCHESTRA AT TOWN HALL, 1959:
REVIVING A LANDMARK







A self-taught trumpet wizard and virtuoso arranger, CHARLES TOLLIVER attended Monk’s 1959 Town Hall show as a teenager and has kept faith with the African American rhythms, large sounds, and group dynamics of Monk’s orchestral form. The man who’s played with Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, and Max Roach revisits Monk’s monumental collaboration with Hall Overton with an entirely new set of transcriptions made from the 1959 concert recording. Tolliver’s update on the original concert attempts to restage the tensions that made the first performance so electric: pianist and orchestra, individual and group. In this spectacular show, Tolliver builds from the little-known quartet performances that opened Monk’s 1959 Town Hall concert, and then he leads his critically acclaimed orchestra through the famous tentet arrangements. Luminary and Monk aficionado Stanley Cowell is on piano.

Charles Tolliver leads his orchestra at Duke University, October 2007. Photograph by Michael Zirkle.



FEBRUARY 27, 2009
IN MY MIND: MONK AT TOWN HALL 1959







Prodigy pianist, gifted composer, and heir to the Monk tradition, JASON MORAN brings together an eight-piece band—The Big Bandwagon—for a full-length, original multimedia piece based on Monk’s Town Hall show; on Smith’s photographs and tapes of the loft rehearsals, including never-before-heard recordings of Monk and Overton talking about the arrangements; and on Moran’s 2007 pilgrimage to Monk’s ancestral home in Newton Grove, North Carolina. Moran’s creative rereading incorporates live performance, projected video, and recorded samples to reflect on the Rocky Mount master’s historical legacy. Just 33 years old, Moran has a nimble, unapologetically eclectic piano style that’s already won him awards, critical appreciation, and a reputation as a young genius. It has also earned him comparisons to Monk, whom Moran cites as the reason he started playing piano in the first place.

World premiere of Jason Moran’s IN MY MIND at Duke University, October 2007. Photograph by Frank Hunter.





This fiftieth anniversary celebration of Thelonious Monk’s historic Town Hall concert grew out of a six-week, 18-event series in 2007, "Following Monk," based at Duke University, just 60 miles from Monk’s hometown, honoring what would have been Monk’s ninetieth birthday (October 10, 2007). The focus was on the Carolina roots of the man and his music, with such musicians as Hank Jones, Charlie Haden, Randy Weston, Barry Harris, Jessica Williams, Henry Butler, and the Kronos Quartet, along with Tolliver and Moran. The Town Hall celebration also grew out of the ongoing Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.



From 1957 to 1965 photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue where major musicians of the day—Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Roland Kirk, Steve Reich, and hundreds more—gathered and played their music. The Town Hall rehearsal tapes and images are one piece of the story revealed through Smith’s documentation of this after-hours New York jazz scene.

The Jazz Loft Project, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in association with WNYC: New York Public Radio, the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Smith estate, is devoted to preserving and cataloging Smith’s tapes, researching the photographs, and obtaining oral history interviews with all surviving loft participants.

The Jazz Loft Project will culminate in winter 2009–10. A book authored by project director Sam Stephenson will be published in November 2009. A 10–part radio series produced by Sara Fishko for WNYC will be broadcast in late 2009-early 2010. A national traveling exhibition will open at the NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS AT LINCOLN CENTER in February 2010.

The Jazz Loft Project is made possible by the generous support of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Grammy Foundation, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commissions.

For more information, please visit www.jazzloftproject.org, or call 919-660-3668, or email lauren.hart@duke.edu.



Thelonious Monk at Town Hall: The 50th Anniversary Celebration (press release, November 21, 2008)

Echoes of Monk, 50 Years Later (The New York Times, September 7, 2008)

Hummable Genius (Duke Magazine, October/November 2007)

Pianist Has Monk ‘In Mind’ (Raleigh News & Observer, October 26, 2007)

Monk Lives in Moran’s Mind (The Duke Chronicle, October, 25, 2007)

Pianist to Interpret Monk’s Concert (Durham Herald-Sun, October 25, 2007)

Classical Monk (Independent Weekly, October 10, 2007)

Digging Up Thelonious Monk's Southern Roots (All Things Considered, October 10, 2007)

Moran on Monk (The Fishko Files, October 10, 2007)

In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959 (Classical Voice of North Carolina, October, 2007)

THELONIOUS MONK: Is This Home? (Oxford American, Issue #58, 2007)

Tape Machine as a Fly on the Wall of Jazz (The New York Times, March 10, 2005)



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Banner photograph: Thelonious Monk. Photograph by W. Eugene Smith. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.