Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie hall full album

After having his cabaret card restored, Monk relaunched his New York career with a landmark six-month residency at the Five Spot Cafe in New York beginning in June 1957, leading a quartet with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums.

Unfortunately little of this group's music was documented due to contractual problems. Coltrane was signed to Prestige at the time, but Monk refused to return to his former label. One studio session by the quartet was made for Riverside, three tunes which were not released until 1961 by the subsidiary label Jazzland along with outtakes from a larger group recording with Coltrane and saxophone pioneer Coleman Hawkins, those results appearing in 1957 as the album Monk's Music. An amateur tape from the Five Spot (not the original residency, but a later September 1958 reunion with Coltrane sitting in for Johnny Griffin) was issued on Blue Note in 1993; and a recording of the quartet performing at a Carnegie Hall concert on November 29, previously "rumoured to exist," was recorded in high fidelity by Voice of America engineers, rediscovered in the collection of the Library of Congress in 2005, and released by Blue Note