Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane

THELONIOUS MONK QUARTET WITH JOHN COLTRANE
Live at Carnegie Hall
(Blue Note/Thelonious)

JOHN COLTRANE
One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note
(Impulse!)

Thelonious Monk's "funny" (per Miles Davis) tunes retain the ability to paste joyously goofy grins on listeners' faces more than half a century after his recording debut. He often returned to the same numbers over his career, but Live at Carnegie Hall is a literal discovery—until now, documentation of Monk's work with John Coltrane has been limited to half an album side or so of studio takes and a poor private recording of a club date. Even before Blue Note picked up the rights, this 51-minute Voice of America tape (from a November 1957 benefit whose bill also included Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Chet Baker) made headlines in The New York Times.

Those grins are likely to become permanent, like your mama warned, upon hearing Coltrane playing off an exuberant Monk, taking "Bye-Ya" for a giddy ride with his already commanding new style. Speedy and swirling, Coltrane's performances there and on "Blue Monk" project a sense of play along with the mighty growth his work was undergoing; this gig came two and a half months after he cut Blue Train.

By early 1965, Coltrane had recorded the widely applauded suite A Love Supreme. He was also well on his way to alienating some listeners with the free-jazz manifesto Ascension. One Down, One Up is the first official issue of four broadcast takes from the era when his quartet's performances were growing ever longer and more questing; announcer Alan Grant marvels at the title track's duration, and it's hard to tell which side of the fence he's on.

Thanks to the radio slot's time limit, a snake-charming 22:47 "My Favorite Things" is still tumbling forward as the music fades. Despite former boss Davis' admonishment to "take the horn out of your mouth," Coltrane gives equal or more time here to pianist McCoy Tyner while using his own solo space to roam at will over bar lines, digging for the beauty in the blatting. Likewise, a brave, somersaulting transformation of Coltrane's soul-time ballad "Afro Blue" disappears into the ether before it resolves. These rude interruptions are kind of fitting, given the (accurate) impression they lend of a man who spent his last years living the cliché of one eradicating the borders between his life and his art. With his wonder at interstellar space, it's easy to imagine that Coltrane would be happy that the airwaves carrying his sound are still bouncing around somewhere out there. RICKEY WRIGHT

THE BAD PLUS
Suspicious Activity?
(Columbia)

Listening to Suspicious Activity? is like playing strip poker with your nuclear family and liking it enough not to care who wins or when; the Bad Plus' appetite for transgression rages harder than that of any band in their class. Granted, they're not exactly plowing a crowded field—while perfectly capable of innovation, even danger (think Cecil Taylor), jazz piano trios exist primarily to showcase instrumental prowess while facilitating the sale of food and/or booze. They don't necessarily think about the latter, nor do they have to; no horns, guitars, or electronics means they're immediately attractive to savvy club owners who know that no matter how disruptive the band gets, servers will still be able to communicate with customers minus mutual shouting. Hence, the Bad Plus glide through packed, six-night stints at the Village Vanguard. Sure, some people dislike them intensely, as Vangelis probably will after hearing this album's "Chariots of Fire." Not because they're white, originally from the Midwest, and perpetually droll, either—the bloodthirsty deconstruction is everything a hater could ask for, its relative fidelity early on merely a setup for a succession of stunts that find bassist Reid Anderson's slippery funk figures laying elastic bridgework between Ethan Iverson's careening piano joyride and David King's rock-infused percussion fusillades. While the group's MO is consistent, mastermind Iverson's capacity for turning colorless schmaltz to iridescent tar is best deployed on the band's originals. Opener "Prehensile Dream" sounds like '70s soap opera material transmuted to fractal fugue, each repetition of the song's unabashedly sentimental theme—there are many, no two alike—heralding a darker, more convoluted resolution. ROD SMITH

The Bad Plus play Dimitriou's Jazz Alley with Mocean Worker at 7:30 p.m. Tues., Nov. 1–Wed., Nov. 2. $21.50.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
OHM+: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948–1980 (Special Edition)
(Ellipsis Arts)

Now that more recorded sounds derive from transistors, samplers, and MIDI decks than "natural" sources, nobody raises an eyebrow at electronic music anymore. But long before Robert Moog or Brian Eno or Wendy Carlos, musician-engineers and engineer-musicians were struggling to produce synthetic sound from equipment never meant for the job. Leon Theremin was one of the first. The electronic version of a conventional instrument that bears his name was already familiar in the mid-1920s, but the real pioneers didn't begin their march into the sonic unknown until the late 1940s, when the easily editable medium of magnetic tape allowed them not just to preserve sounds electronically created but to mix and match them with other recorded material as well. John Cage's I Ching–derived Williams Mix (1952) lasts fewer than six minutes and contained literally thousands of edits. Composer Bebe Barron, who realized the tape from Cage's 700-page "score" with her husband, Louis, is quoted in the liner notes as wishing "that we hadn't spent so long on some of it," but it holds up better as "music" than the excerpt from the Barrons' original electronic score for the film Forbidden Planet from four years later, so Cage has the last laugh anyway.