The Complete ‘Round About Midnight At The Cafe Bohemia
Kenny Dorham
The Complete 'Round About Midnight at the Café Bohemia documents a single extraordinary night — May 31, 1956 — when trumpeter Kenny Dorham led his working quintet through four full sets at the legendary Café Bohemia in Greenwich Village, with Blue Note producer Alfred Lion and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder capturing the entire evening. The original 1956 Blue Note release (BLP 1524) presented only six of the night's tracks; additional material surfaced on Japanese pressings in 1984, and the full 17-track, two-hour document was finally assembled as a complete 2-CD set in 2002. Blue Note issued a new Tone Poet Vinyl Edition in April 2026 — a 3-LP all-analog set cut directly from Van Gelder's original master tapes by Kevin Gray, packaged with never-before-seen Francis Wolff photographs and an in-depth essay by Syd Schwartz. The set list draws on Dorham originals alongside compositions by Thelonious Monk ("'Round About Midnight"), Dizzy Gillespie ("A Night in Tunisia"), and Great American Songbook standards like "Autumn in New York" and "My Heart Stood Still."
The band Dorham assembled for the evening was exceptional. Alongside him were tenor saxophonist J.R. Monterose, a young Kenny Burrell on guitar, Bobby Timmons on piano — three years before his breakout with Cannonball Adderley — Sam Jones on bass, and Arthur Edgehill on drums. All About Jazz awarded the complete set five stars, calling it "as fine an example of hard bop as any ever recorded" and urging listeners to seek out the complete edition over the original six-track LP. Dorham, often underrated relative to his contemporaries like Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, is heard here at the height of his powers — a "fantastic composer" and "infectious trumpeter" whose gifts are given full room to breathe across the arc of a real club night, making the complete release feel, as one reviewer put it, like "spending a long night at the legendary old jazz club."
The Complete ‘Round About Midnight At The Cafe Bohemia
Kenny Dorham
The Complete 'Round About Midnight at the Café Bohemia documents a single extraordinary night — May 31, 1956 — when trumpeter Kenny Dorham led his working quintet through four full sets at the legendary Café Bohemia in Greenwich Village, with Blue Note producer Alfred Lion and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder capturing the entire evening. The original 1956 Blue Note release (BLP 1524) presented only six of the night's tracks; additional material surfaced on Japanese pressings in 1984, and the full 17-track, two-hour document was finally assembled as a complete 2-CD set in 2002. Blue Note issued a new Tone Poet Vinyl Edition in April 2026 — a 3-LP all-analog set cut directly from Van Gelder's original master tapes by Kevin Gray, packaged with never-before-seen Francis Wolff photographs and an in-depth essay by Syd Schwartz. The set list draws on Dorham originals alongside compositions by Thelonious Monk ("'Round About Midnight"), Dizzy Gillespie ("A Night in Tunisia"), and Great American Songbook standards like "Autumn in New York" and "My Heart Stood Still."
The band Dorham assembled for the evening was exceptional. Alongside him were tenor saxophonist J.R. Monterose, a young Kenny Burrell on guitar, Bobby Timmons on piano — three years before his breakout with Cannonball Adderley — Sam Jones on bass, and Arthur Edgehill on drums. All About Jazz awarded the complete set five stars, calling it "as fine an example of hard bop as any ever recorded" and urging listeners to seek out the complete edition over the original six-track LP. Dorham, often underrated relative to his contemporaries like Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, is heard here at the height of his powers — a "fantastic composer" and "infectious trumpeter" whose gifts are given full room to breathe across the arc of a real club night, making the complete release feel, as one reviewer put it, like "spending a long night at the legendary old jazz club."