An Unnamed Custodian Recorded Thelonious Monk at Palo Alto
On the Friday before the concert, Danny Scher phoned the San Francisco club where Thelonious Monk was playing. Monk had heard nothing about a Sunday engagement at Palo Alto High School. Scher, sixteen and already holding a signed contract, explained the booking and found a ride: his older brother would collect the quartet in San Francisco and bring it to the school.
The teenager had started promoting concerts because Bay Area jazz clubs were bars, and he was too young to enter them. Monk proved a difficult sell at his predominantly white high school, so Scher rode into neighbouring East Palo Alto and put up posters in its predominantly Black community. Racial and political tension between the two towns formed the setting; Scher still had to fill the room and guarantee the musicians’ fee.
Rain fell on 27 October 1968, but the concert sold out. Monk arrived with tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist Larry Gales and drummer Ben Riley. Their set ran for forty-seven minutes, distinct from the longer school programme with its local opening acts. Scher heard the band pressing harder than usual: “Everything was a little faster than normal.” Ron McCurdy later heard the same urgency in Monk’s percussive attack and the quartet’s spontaneous responses.
The recording depended on a school custodian whose name nobody retained. Scher remembers his proposal: “I’ll tune the piano, if you let me record the concert.” Scher supplied the tape, the custodian captured the performance and handed the reel over afterward. The available accounts do not establish who owned the recorder or who placed the microphones, so the achievement needs no invented technical résumé.
Scher kept the reel in a box for fifty years because it carried emotional weight for him, not because he had designed a preservation programme. In 2018, encouraged by saxophonist Jimmy Heath, he took it to T. S. Monk. The son did not need a label or a date to identify the pianist: “From the first measure, I knew my father was feeling really good.”
A final obstacle came from an old Columbia contract. The signature on Monk’s concert programme helped demonstrate that the signature on the document produced by the label was not genuine. Impulse! released “Palo Alto” on 18 September 2020. By then, the teenage promoter had become a veteran professional and the forgotten reel had become a catalogue recording. The person who first pressed record remained anonymous.