LINER NOTES Thelonious Monk Live at Palo Alto High School in the Fall
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LINER NOTES Thelonious Monk Live at Palo Alto High School In the fall of 1968, a sixteen-year-old Jewish kid named Danny Scher had a dream. He wanted to bring the renowned Thelonious Monk and his quartet to play a benefit concert at his high school in Palo Alto, California. Armed with little more than a telephone, posters, a persuasive pitch, an impressive knowledge of jazz, and iron-willed determination, Scher not only made it happen but temporarily united a divided city. As Scher makes clear in his own notes, the kid was no neophyte. Born on October 19, 1951, his conversion to jazz began at age ten. A few years later, he was putting up posters and doing odd jobs for the legendary Bay Area jazz promoter Darlene Chan and critic Ralph Gleason. His classmates at Palo Alto High School all knew Danny as the red-headed kid who spun jazz records every Wednesday at lunch time for anyone willing to listen. During his junior year (1967-68), Scher was elected chairman of the campus International Club, and in an effort to raise money for the Peace Corps and school construction projects in Kenya and Peru, he organized jazz concerts. In December he produced an afternoon concert featuring pianist Vince Guaraldi and vocalist Jon Hendricks, followed by vibraphonist Cal Tjader and his quintet in April. Now entering his senior year, he had his sights on Monk and possibly Duke Ellington. Darlene Chan had him call Monk’s manager, Jules Colomby. Jules quoted a fee of $500 and agreed to the gig, but never followed up with a fully executed contract. What Scher did not know was that Jules, a noted music producer, had only recently taken over for his brother, Harry Colomby, who, after nearly twelve years of managing Monk left for Hollywood to try his hand at producing movies. Jules not only lacked experience in management, he inherited an artist facing severe health and financial challenges. When young Danny Scher, just shy of his 17th birthday, made that call in the early fall of 1968, he could not have known that Monk’s income had dropped precipitously, or that he was deeply indebted to Columbia Records, or that the IRS took most of his meager earnings the previous year. Critics had begun to turn on Monk, disparaging his quartet as “predictable” and tired. He even dropped in Down Beat’s International Critics Poll, falling from fourth the previous year to sixth place, behind Earl Hines, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Cecil Taylor and Herbie Hancock. Dissatisfied with Monk’s record sales, Columbia executives ill-advisedly tried to market his latest LP, Underground, to a younger rock generation. The press kit read, “Now, in 1968, with rock music and psychedelia capturing the imagination of young America, Thelonious Monk has once again become an underground hero, this time as an oracle of the new underground.” Their promotional materials barely mentioned the music, focusing instead on the provocative photo on the cover, in which Monk poses at an upright piano, machine gun strapped to his hip, surrounded by weapons of war, bottles of vintage wine, a slim young model dressed as a French Resistance fighter, and a Nazi prisoner of war tied up in the corner. The print ads for the LP heralded “The Underground Groove” in psychedelic style typeface and promised that with the addition of four new compositions and “another great cover photo that’s just out-of-sight, the Rock generation will be clamoring for more and more Monk.” That the “Rock generation” failed to boost record sales surprised no one save Columbia’s marketing department. Nevertheless, sales were respectable thanks to Monk’s loyal fans— young and old—but for the corporate giant respectable didn’t cut it. The pressure on Monk to produce and generate income for his family took its toll on his health. During the spring of 1968, he was forced to cancel engagements and postpone a recording session for Columbia. Then his wife Nellie came down with a severe case of the flu and was out of commission for three weeks. Because she wore multiple hats as road manager, business manager, mother, caregiver, and accountant, it meant that contracts and agreements remained in envelopes unsigned, bills went unpaid, and tax returns were exceedingly late. Then in May, Monk was hospitalized after suffering a seizure and lay in a coma for several days. When he missed yet another recording session as a result, Columbia’s business office callously charged Monk the full studio fee. Indeed, he hadn’t fully recovered before going back on the road, this time as part of a national summer tour sponsored by the Schlitz Brewing Company. The “Schlitz Salute to Jazz” covered twenty-one cities in nine weeks, and with Dionne Warwick as the headliner and Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Mann, Jimmy Smith, Gary Burton, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela on the roster. So when Monk began his two week engagement at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop on October 22nd, he took any opportunity to earn a little extra bread on the side. Of course, Monk’s personal struggles occurred against a backdrop of a series of tumultuous national crises. The year 1968 was marked by the brutal assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, unsettling revelations about America’s war in Vietnam, and the brutal police beating of antiwar protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. For African Americans confined to crumbling ghettoes, the spring and summer of 1968 was a period of rage and frustration. In reaction to Dr. King’s death in April, racial unrest engulfed at least 126 cities and towns, including East Palo Alto, a predominantly black and poor community separated from the wealthier and whiter Palo Alto by the Bayshore freeway. Anguished black students from Ravenswood High School poured into the streets, throwing rocks, overturning a car and assaulting an unfortunate truck driver caught in the melee. The unrest surprised no one in East Palo Alto. Black youth had rebelled before—in August of 1965 on the heels of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, and again in August of 1966. Indeed, racial tensions between East Palo Alto and its neighbors date back to the 1940s, when Southern black migrants flocked to the area in search of affordable housing. By the mid-1960s, African Americans were in the majority, but because it remained an unincorporated area governed by San Mateo County, its residents had no power to govern its own affairs. The Bayshore freeway construction in 1955 destroyed almost half of the community’s small businesses. A few years later, neighboring Menlo Park and Palo Alto annexed a quarter of its original territory, stripping it of much needed property tax revenue and population. A 1968 report found that East Palo Alto had the highest rate of unemployment (12%) in the county and a median annual income of only $3,000. Hoping to revitalize East Palo Alto, local leaders not only sought incorporation but established independent social, economic, and cultural institutions designed to empower black residents. In 1966, a group of black educators founded the Nairobi Day School, which in a matter of three years expanded from elementary to community college. Donald Reid, a black technical writer and activist, went further, launching a campaign to rename East Palo Alto Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. His proposal was not “anti-white.” He and other supporters believed that if they could instill a sense of pride of place in the community by adopting an African name, they could improve schools and neighborhoods, develop a stronger economy, and ultimately make Nairobi an attractive place for all families, irrespective of race. On April 3, 1968, East Palo Alto’s Municipal Council voted to hold a hearing on the name change. The next day Dr. King was killed, deepening racial discord. In September, East Palo Alto was the site of a major national Black Power conference that included Black Panther leaders Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, and Maulana Karenga of US Organization. These political developments did not go unnoticed in neighboring Palo Alto. Black students bused to Palo Alto schools encountered a fair share of racist graffiti and physical threats. But as home to Stanford University, the affluent residents of Palo Alto tended to be on the liberal end of the spectrum. The campus was rocked by protests, mainly against the Vietnam war and the CIA’s campus recruitment program. That summer Stanford made history by hiring its first black assistant coaches in football and basketball. King’s assassination convinced a group of liberal white homeowners to challenge longstanding real estate practices of maintaining segregation and actively recruited black middle-class families to buy homes in Palo Alto. This is what the world looked like when young Danny Scher set out to bring Thelonious Monk to his campus. The posters he hung promoting the concert competed with signs and bumper stickers urging East Palo residents to vote “Yes on Nairobi.” The cops told him not to go to East Palo Alto, but he wouldn’t listen. And when black residents saw what he was doing, they were skeptical. Scher recalled, “So now I’m putting up posters in East Palo Alto and the word on the street is, ‘So Monk is coming to lily white Palo Alto? We’ll believe it when we see it.” Ticket sales were slow at first, but Scher had the good sense to pair Monk’s quartet with two popular local bands—groups that not only enjoyed a substantial following in the black community and on Stanford’s campus but embodied the political climate of the moment.