San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 11/15/1958
Album of the Week

Musicians and critics alike generally recognize Thelonious Monk as one of the major figures in modern jazz. By virtue of his contributions to the Minton group in the earl 1940s, Monk receives credit – along with Parker, Gillespie, Clarke, and others – for being a founding father of the bop school. Monk has since remained in the van of musical progress – as this session attests – and is perhaps the “most listened to” pianist on the current scene. Recorded “live” at the Five Spot (a New York supper club) the set ably captures the exciting core of an evening’s performance. Much in evidence are the spontaneity and enthusiasm normally present at an informal soiree of this sort, with the audience reaction obviously being a contributing factor to the compelling, often inspired, solos. Programmed are five Monk originals (plus two tracks of his haunting theme, Epistrophy). Especially palatable are Light Blue, Evidence, Rhythm-a-ning, and Blue Monk. Definitely superior.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 10/26/1958

One of the most interesting developments in jazz during the last year has been the emergence of Thelonious Monk as the dominant pianist of the year – a development which, I suspect, was due less to an improvement in Monk than to the development of a generation of jazzmen capable of playing with him.

Until recently, musicians have praises him, had admired him – and have gone to whatever lengths necessary (with some few exceptions) to keep off the platform with him. (There was, for example, the occasion in 1954 when, on a record date, Miles Davis asked him to “lay out” on Miles’ choruses of Bags Groove; Monk complied and then, in his own chorus, proceeded to cut Miles as thoroughly as one could wish. This is on Prestige 7109, a reissue.)

Early this year a change in the trend could have been noted in Mulligan Meets Monk (https://thejazztome.info/thelonious-monk-mulligan-meets-monk/,Riverside 12-247]) where Mulligan went over and did it Monk’s way and produced one of the best records of the year.

Now, just to prove the point, comes a whole new handful of LPs by Monk dominated groups, in which the peculiar genius which is Monk’s shines through the work of the hornmen for perhaps the first time.

The best of these, for the initiate, is probably Thelonious in Action in which Monk appears with the group he recently led at New York’s Five Spot Café. Here Johnny Griffin shows himself as a tenor who possibly tops Rollins and Coltrane, probably the only tenor who can keep up with Monk both in terms of harmonic concept and in terms of simply getting around on his horn. The cognizant cats will want to compare Rhythm-a-ning with his version on the Mulligan album. The uninitiate will need to be warned that this is not for them – unless they, too, want to become cognizant cats.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 11/29/1958

A recorded café performance of the pianist Thelonious Monk finds him with Johnny Griffin, tenor sax; Ahmed Abdul-Malik, bass; and Roy Haynes, drums. The famous Monk composes assertive, angular themes with a great deal of chordal nuance, and Griffin embellishes them here with his own sinuous wiles. It is brusque, blue music, probably not to the taste of anyone who is not well into the modern jazz idiom. Originally, as they say in certain critical circles, I found it difficult of access, but I have long since become a Monk devotee and regard him as robust and sensitive master of modern barrel-house style.

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Down Beat : 12/25/1958
Martin Williams : 3 stars

Thelonious Monk is not an easy man to play with. You have to work and you certainly can’t coast.

The record is disappointing chiefly because of Johnny Griffin and his response to Monk and the quintet. I heard real freshness in Griffin’s first records. And in a previous encounter with Monk on recordings, he seemed to be responding to the music very well.

Here he shows little feeling of the quality of these compositions, even in stating their themes. He sounds uninvolved in much of what he plays and without conviction, and what another man might call life and feeling in his playing often seems to me forced and contrived. His solos impose all kinds of lines onto the pieces, hardly catch, much less explore, their possibilities of mood, melody or harmony. And his lapse into three silly folk song interpolations in a row on such a sublimely provocative composition as Epistrophy is worse than a shame. Essentially, Griffin seems largely to have fallen back on the kind of thing he was exposed to in the Hampton band in the ’40s – a tour de force of contrivance, insensitivity, false excitement, and length. He turns Rhythm-a-ning into a vehicle for that kind of riff-slinging (even with a couple of honks) and it turns out to be a good one; Monk’s response is to base his solo on a sprightly interplay of two ideas he often works with in that piece – and he later uses one of them against Malik. It’s his sense of form again, in all this formlessness.

Just as Griffin seemed to be loosing the quality of Monk’s music in this group, Roy Haynes was gaining it, and Abdul-Malik – despite the bad changes – certainly was developing a solo style.

Monk’s response to this quintet might seem curious, but I think it was very wise. His playing took a conservative turn. It is still personally expressive, imaginative, and has form, but the slight harmonic relaxation of much of it and the fact that in his solos he was using thicker textures and was less free with his masterful capacity for space, pause, and rest, went a way toward holding this group together I think. After the virtuosic sax ramblings on Blue Monk, Monk plays a very good solo with some of those surprise twists which he makes seem so inevitably right. He rebuilds the theme splendidly on Evidence by gradual simplification of his solo lines until he is using it directly and starkly against the bass solo.

Light Blue has a good Monk solo exploring the theme itself. Coming On the Hudson is a beautiful line, somewhat reminiscent (in quality only) of ‘Round Midnight and Crepuscule, and has splendid accompaniment behind Griffin’s best solo and the most harmonically interesting (but still lyric, melodic, and fitting) of Monk’s improvisations on the set. Both are new pieces and the latter especially does no damage to my conviction that Monk is the first major composer in jazz since Ellington – and by composer, I do not mean that he writes “tunes.”

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

This album captures the exciting core of an evening’s performance by a unique jazz group at an unusual club. The group is unique simply because any jazz unit led and modeled by THELONIOUS MONK deserves that adjective; the club is unusual because as a casual bar deep down on New York’s East Side, it contrasts sharply with the formal chicness or alternative high-pressure pseudo-hipness of most of today’s jazz spots.

And, when future jazz histories are written, the combination of Monk and the Five Spot may go down as one of the important legends and landmarks. For it was in this club that Thelonious spent that vast bulk of his working hours during 1957 and ’58, years in which the critics and the jazz public seemed finally to be making themselves fully aware of the vast significance of Monk’s role in jazz and also of the great vitality and sheer enjoyment value of his writing and playing. There have been, in the past, various kinds of important associations between men and places in jazz: King Oliver and Chicago’s Lincoln Gardens, where Louis Armstrong first joined him; Benny Goodman and the Paramount Theater in New York, where the dancing in the aisles first heralded the coming of the Swing craze. For modern jazz as a whole, there are key place-names already: Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, where Monk and Gillespie and others first formulated “bop”; and 52nd Street, where it was first exposed to the public. Thus, the Five Spot association comes along relatively late in Monk’s career and in the life of modern jazz; but the fact is that Thelonious for years operated in an unwarranted semi-obscurity, built in part out of the genuine complexity and difficulty of his music, and in part out of the way run-away press-agentry and rumor had exaggerated his “mad genius” aspects. And surely all this was compounded by the relative infrequency of his public performances. Then, in the Summer of 1957, when the success of certain recent recordings (most notably Brilliant Corners) had begun to tear at this veil somewhat, a Monk Quartet opened at the Five Spot.

The crowds came, often to the point where the small club had to turn them away at the door; and they came again and again. There is no denying, also, that the experience of working before enthusiastic crowds and their immediate reactions was of value to Monk: any artist seeks to communicate, and here was communication (by a musician often accused of not being able to reach any but the most limited audience) being swiftly and constantly proved, night after night.

Thelonious worked the rest of the year at the Five Spot, then took a breather, but was brought back in late Spring of ’58. The crowds and their enthusiasm were as great, or greater. The group, however, was changed. The original quartet had Coltrane on tenor; Wilbur Ware, bass; Shadow Wilson, drums. The group heard here is of course not the same, nor does it sound the same, nor could it. Monk himself is a constantly changing artist; also, he is amazingly sensitive to the nature of the men he works with. To a large degree, Thelonious molds any group he leads into his patten; but it is important to recognize that the pattern he builds for a particular group comprehends and utilizes the specific values of the men with him. Aside from the basic fact that both are modern tenor men of outstanding talents, Johnny Griffin and John Coltrane are not the same man, and Monk is fully aware of this. Whether a particular listener likes one of the other “better” is quite beside the point; the point is that this group is the Monk quartet with Griffin, and its approach, style and even repertoire (all within the overall Monk pattern) clearly show that. This is apparent not only on the two Monk compositions recorded here for the first time (Coming on the Hudson and Light Blue) but also in the new shapings of such older selections as Evidence and Blue Monk.

It is important, in listening to an “old” Monk tune, to recognize that he is constantly rebuilding and re-using this material. It is really fully comparable to another musician’s making a new arrangement of an old standard because he still like its basic melody and structure, but wants to use it as a vessel for newer ideas. The only difference is that Monk, taking advantage of the fact that Thelonious today is not identical with Thelonious of ten years ago, often uses his own material as such a vessel. (Actually, such albums as Monk’s Music and Monk’s Town Hall LP, both featuring expanded scorings of Monk classics, were built around precisely this concept.

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This was the first time that Thelonious had been recorded “live,” out of the studio. Perhaps the most immediately apparent difference is that Monk on the job seems more interested in himself as a pianist, as a performer, as (and this is very much a part of the artists) a showman. There is also, of course, that give-and-take of audience reaction: applause, conversation, the comings and goings of a typical Five Spot crowd (made up in varying percentages of neo-Bohemian types who live nearby, musicians, jazz fans, the merely curious – and those who manage to combine more than one of these categories).

Each side of this LP offers a full band set exactly as played, concluding – as is the case with almost every set the group does – with a brief statement of Epistrophy as a closing theme.

(An historical note on the club at which this album was recorded should be added here. In 1962, the original Five Spot was forced to close – the building that housed it was due to be torn down. The following year, when it reopened a few blocks uptown with the same name and, to a large extent, the same atmosphere, the new Five Spot soon offered a long-run engagement by – naturally enough – a Thelonious Monk Quartet.)