Straight, No Chaser
Thelonious Monk
Straight, No Chaser is a studio album by jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, recorded at Columbia's celebrated 30th Street Studio in New York across three sessions on November 14–15, 1966 and January 10, 1967, and released in 1967 via Columbia Records. Produced by Teo Macero — the Columbia producer who also helmed many of Miles Davis's landmark recordings — the album features what is regarded as Monk's "classic quartet": Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, Larry Gales on bass, and Ben Riley on drums. It was the sixth and final studio album Monk would record for Columbia with a small group, and represents the last quartet he would ever assemble for studio work. The original LP contained just six performances, three of which were edited down to fit the constraints of vinyl — most significantly the extraordinary "Japanese Folk Song (Kōjō no Tsuki)," which ran over 16 minutes in full — alongside two unaccompanied piano solos: Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" and the hymn "This Is My Story, This Is My Song."
The repertoire spans a characteristic Monk cross-section: his own compositions "Locomotive," the blues title track "Straight, No Chaser" (a piece he had first written in the 1940s), and "We See," alongside Duke Ellington's "I Didn't Know About You" and the Japanese folk melody. The 1996 Columbia/Legacy CD reissue, remastered from the original four-track analog masters by Mark Wilder and produced by Orrin Keepnews, restored all previously abridged performances to their full lengths and added three bonus tracks — an alternate take of "I Didn't Know About You," "Green Chimneys," and "This Is My Story, This Is My Song" — adding roughly 25 minutes of music and making it the definitive version of the record. Jazz Views described the quartet's interplay as bringing "a mature flavor which places Monk's solos in a completely new context," and the album stands as a quietly authoritative late-career statement from one of jazz's most singular voices.
Straight, No Chaser
Thelonious Monk
Straight, No Chaser is a studio album by jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, recorded at Columbia's celebrated 30th Street Studio in New York across three sessions on November 14–15, 1966 and January 10, 1967, and released in 1967 via Columbia Records. Produced by Teo Macero — the Columbia producer who also helmed many of Miles Davis's landmark recordings — the album features what is regarded as Monk's "classic quartet": Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, Larry Gales on bass, and Ben Riley on drums. It was the sixth and final studio album Monk would record for Columbia with a small group, and represents the last quartet he would ever assemble for studio work. The original LP contained just six performances, three of which were edited down to fit the constraints of vinyl — most significantly the extraordinary "Japanese Folk Song (Kōjō no Tsuki)," which ran over 16 minutes in full — alongside two unaccompanied piano solos: Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" and the hymn "This Is My Story, This Is My Song."
The repertoire spans a characteristic Monk cross-section: his own compositions "Locomotive," the blues title track "Straight, No Chaser" (a piece he had first written in the 1940s), and "We See," alongside Duke Ellington's "I Didn't Know About You" and the Japanese folk melody. The 1996 Columbia/Legacy CD reissue, remastered from the original four-track analog masters by Mark Wilder and produced by Orrin Keepnews, restored all previously abridged performances to their full lengths and added three bonus tracks — an alternate take of "I Didn't Know About You," "Green Chimneys," and "This Is My Story, This Is My Song" — adding roughly 25 minutes of music and making it the definitive version of the record. Jazz Views described the quartet's interplay as bringing "a mature flavor which places Monk's solos in a completely new context," and the album stands as a quietly authoritative late-career statement from one of jazz's most singular voices.