Who's Afraid of George Taitt?
Bill Wood | Vashon Island, WA | 06/29/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"If you think you know Monk and you've never heard his early Blue Note recordings, then you don't really know Monk. Over the length of his career, Monk never really changed his approach to music making, so listening to these tracks, recorded for Blue Note when he was thirty, is like drinking city water at the spring; it's that sharp, and that clear and that new. You can hear the revolution as it happened. And don't be afraid of some of the strange names Monk recorded with in those early days - people like George Taitt (trumpet) and Danny Quebec West (alto). They were all young and at the starting gate together. Some guys dropped out of the race pretty quick, but they were all there at the beginning and they do just fine. Don't blow a fortune on the boxed set. This new CD from Definitive does the job in exemplary fashion at sixteen bucks. The tracks with Coleman Hawkins don't do much except point up the fact that Monk really wasn't much of a sideman. He was just....Monk."