Listening: Monk on Columbia Records

As anyone who's ever talked to me about music will attest, I consider Thelonious Monk one of the most advanced musical intelligences of my lifetime. Until recently, I'd rather snobbishly preferred his Blue Note and early Prestige albums (which had people like Art Blakey, Milt Jackson, and Sonny Rollins digging into Monk's compositions) and figured the many albums his quartet (with Charlie Rouse on tenor sax) made were the relaxed rewards for finally crossing over to mainstream jazz success. But the one thing I notice listening to the quartet sides (especially the two neat live dates, Live at the "It" Club and Live at the Jazz Workshop) is how much fun the band has with this music. You can tell how much being a working band has freed these musicians to stretch out a little. Come to think of it, that same feeling of confident playfulness was one of the reasons Live at Carnegie Hall with Coltrane was the jazz reissue of last year, if not of the last decade.