The Riverside Tenor Sessions follows Thelonious Monk through a remarkable series of encounters with tenor saxophonists who heard his music in radically different ways. Sonny Rollins brings architectural strength to Brilliant Corners; Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane share the expanded colours of Monk’s Music; Coltrane’s concentrated lines make their own dialogue with Monk’s piano on the celebrated quartet material.
The journey continues through live and studio sessions with Johnny Griffin, Charlie Rouse and Harold Land. Griffin’s speed and exuberance animate Thelonious in Action and Misterioso. Rouse, whose partnership with Monk became enduring, enters a language of clipped themes and asymmetric spaces with extraordinary calm. 5 by Monk by 5 broadens the ensemble, while the Blackhawk performance adds Land and a live club setting to the story. The changing rhythm sections further reveal how differently Monk’s tunes can move. Heard together, these albums reveal that Monk never required a tenor player to imitate his phrasing. His compositions are strong enough to accommodate Hawkins’s depth, Rollins’s thematic invention, Coltrane’s intensity and the sharply individual voices that followed. The box makes comparison part of the pleasure.
This Analogue Productions box presents the collection across seven 180-gram LPs. Its scale makes the set a musical study as well as a collector’s object: one composer-pianist, several major tenor languages and a body of work heard developing across complete albums. Michael 45 stores the goods in Germany and ships from Hilden, enabling German and EU customers to obtain the box without a personal US import or the wait for customs clearance.
Artist page: All titles with John Coltrane
Customer question: Buying Analogue Productions records in Europe
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.