UNBURIED TREASURE.(Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane's Jazz performances)

UNBURIED TREASURE -- By now it seems plausible to imagine that every musical performance since the age of Edison was recorded, even the most obscure and most fabled. Jazz fans have long been obsessed with the pianist Thelonious Monk's short-lived 1957 band, which featured John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, and, while a handful of vibrant studio recordings exist, the quartet was never captured live. Or so it seemed. Then the archivist Larry Applebaum, working through tapes at the Library of Congress, stumbled upon a haphazardly marked Voice of America recording of a Carnegie Hall benefit concert. The astonishing results are now available, on "Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall" (Blue Note).

During the fifties, Coltrane played with Miles Davis and earned a reputation not only as an exceptional tenor player but also as a hard-core drug abuser. By early 1957, everything had changed: Coltrane was drug free and beginning a new job with Monk, a brilliant, if still somewhat shadowy, figure in the jazz world. A five-month gig at the Five Spot, a New York ...