Two of the greatest to ever grace the world with their musical genius are John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. Here, in a piece from 2005, Nat Hentoff describes their New York City residency at the Five Spot, and later at Carnegie Hall, in 1957, writing:

I was not yet born to be present at the most legendary gig in jazz history — when cornetist King Oliver with his second horn Louis Armstrong played the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago in the early 1920s. But I was in New York in 1957 when the Five Spot on the Lower East Side was filled for five months, starting in July, with lay jazz enthusiasts but also with many visiting musicians who marveled at the continuous daring adventures of pianist-composer Thelonious Monk and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. I was there several nights a week, usually staying through the last set.

That engagement was a breakthrough for Monk, who had long been without steady work, while many critics were dismissing his music as “strange.” Moreover, he had been exiled for six years from the New York jazz club scene following a false arrest on a narcotics charge that cost him his police-issued cabaret card, which he had only just recovered.

Coltrane had acquired considerable notice, not all of it favorable, earlier in the 1950s with Miles Davis, but his heroin and alcohol addiction had led to Davis firing him — and to Coltrane kicking both habits. Working with Monk at the Five Spot energized Coltrane to go beyond anything he had previously imagined he could play.

“I learned from him in every way,” Coltrane told Down Beat in 1961 — “through the senses, theoretically, technically.” And he told me: “Once you get to see the inside, everything fits so well in Monk’s work.” One night at the Five Spot, however, Coltrane came off the stand looking devastated. “I lost my place,” he said to me, “and it was like falling down an open elevator shaft.” In all the following nights when I was there, that never happened again.

Trombonist J.J. Johnson distilled the experience of those nights when he told jazz historian Ira Gitler in 1961: “Since Charlie Parker, the most electrifying sound I’ve heard in contemporary jazz was Coltrane playing with Monk at the Five Spot. It was incredible.”

Until now, that original collaboration could be heard only on recordings of three studio tracks in Riverside’s “Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane” and on Blue Note’s “Live at the Five Spot — Discovery,” an amateur, handheld recording that lacked the full sense of being there.

Nine years ago, however, Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter, a professor of jazz at Rutgers-Newark, saw a news item that the quartet had been taped by the Voice of America — not at the Five Spot, but at a Carnegie Hall benefit concert. There is a huge Voice of America Collection at the Library of Congress, and Prof. Porter kept trying to unearth this buried treasure.

This February, Larry Applebaum, the Library of Congress’s invaluable jazz specialist and recording lab supervisor, was going through some Voice of America acetate tapes that were awaiting digitization. He saw some reels labeled “Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957” and — Eureka! — a hand-written note taped to one of the boxes caught his eye: “T. Monk.” And there were song titles on the box.

Now you can be at that Nov. 29, 1957, Carnegie Hall gig with Monk, Coltrane, drummer Shadow Wilson and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik (who had recently replaced the quartet’s original bassist, Wilbur Ware). The Blue Note Label has released the “Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane,” produced with superior remastering by Monk’s son, T.S. Monk; Thelonious Records; and Michael Cuscuna, the nonpareil archivist at Mosaic Records. (It’s available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, Tower Records, Borders, etc.)

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