All Monk : The Riverside Albums

1. This 16 CD set is value for Money considering that each CD would cost you $4.50 approx2. Most of the Albums are really good enjoyable music for ages forty plus. Those under forty may not like it so much. No i dont mean an Adult rated movie !! It is just that some musical tracks are best appreciated in your sunset years with grey hair !! Authentic Vintage Wine.3. Some of the Notable Albums are Thelonius Monk in Italy (The Best of his numbers) Thelonius Monk in France, Thelonius Monk 5 by Monk by 5, Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall Thelonius Monk plays Duke Ellington, Theloniuos Monk at the BlackHawk4. This is not the foot stomping, paralytic fits variety of music heard at the Pubs. Some un-appreciative Barbarians might refer to it as Music heard at a Hotel Lobby but thats not it listen to the works of Art and its truly a rythmic brilliance of Jazz masterpieces. There are no vocals to any of the tracks but its certainly some very nice music to pour a couple of rounds of Scotch and enjoy your weekends with whomever !!5. Even the other Albums are good but the ones I have mentioned will get Old Monk haters evangelized.6. I heard Old Monk very long back in my early twenties but then it was not really appealing to my ears and my young blood was stoned immaculate !! But now it really gets my head dancing to each note.7. You need a good music system for such tracks with good wooden speakers.8. With the Riverside Collections you dont really have to buy any more. It delivers everything in a clean price Tag considering the cost of music at the stores these days. You might get them cheaper in India but the stores in India dont stock them at all. And of course please dont indulge in music piracy if they gave you such a good time with their musical repertoire please reward the artists with a non-pirated purchase.9. Well you can always go back to your paralytic fits variety of music and enjoy an evenings drink and dance with Mr Beans. So long farewell hope you enjoy the music on a relaxed weekend with Scotch or Vintage Wine. I repeat again you will need good wooden speakers and the acoustics of room must be right (dont overstuff with furniture) and it feels like heaven with each sip.

I'll add photos at some point, but the new set I recieved is different than what amazon has pictured, it is a clamshell box with the CD's in thin cardstock sleeves with the album artwork and tracklisting for each album on the sleeve. Each CD has the tracks listed and are the Original Jazz Classics editions of the albums. There is a booklet with the box that has the album covers reprinted with the track listings, songwriters, personnel recording dates and basic info for each album. The albums are organized in order. I would have been happy if the set had come in the large jewel 'fat boy' jewel cases, but I am much happier getting them in cardboard sleeves, it makes the set more compact and I like having the album artwork. The sleeves are thin budget quality, but the clamshell box is much sturdier cardboard to store them. Sound quality is great and most albums have a few bonus tracks. Most of the albums were remastered in the late eighties, some were done in the nineties. This particular set is a great deal and I recommend it for those that don't have most of these albums as the cost of the box is much less than buying the albums separately, even cheaper than dowloads. It's a great way to dive into a large part of Monk's catalogue.

The first reviewer here sums up the set pretty well, but here are a couple of extra notes:- At least for the moment, the set is available domestically. I ordered from Amazon on a Friday, got Saturday.- Though the OP mentions this is a Universal Music product, I want to affirm that - it's not gray market material, as so many jazz imports are.- While the set may not contain all the alternate and broken takes from the original Riverside box, many of the cds are 'expanded,' offering more than the original vinyl. I think this pretty much hits the sweet spot of reissues - enough to offer interesting insight, not so much as to make listening feel like a chore.Anyway, from Amazon, shipped to New York state it worked out to a little more than $5 a disc. For magnificent, vital music right smack in the heart of the 20th century, a great, great bargain.Scott A.Watertown NY

There are sixteen CDs in this collection, representing sixteen different LPs. Thus far, I've only listened to four of them, and I already feel like I got my money's worth.

What a wonderful reissue! I had a couple of these LPs back in the day but I am delighted to find all of them now in one box (and at such a reasonable price.) What amazing sessions! The quality is excellent. They are clean as a whistle and some of the best sounding CD jazz remasters I've heard. Nice 4-color booklet details each individual album. If you dig Monk, you should own these!

Great value. I'm amazed at the audio quality of these discs. Clearly they were recorded very well and that quality is maintained in these discs. You will not believe Misterioso was recorded in 1958. If feels like I'm right in the club!

I bought this set for myself & liked it so much that I bought another as a gift. Monk never played a piece of music the same way twice, so don't be put off by the multiple versions of the same tunes. The price averaged out to slightly more than $5 per CD, which is close to criminal when you consider Monk's true genius! My personal favorite is a 21 1/2 minute recording made while he was composing "Round Midnight" -- a rare glimpse into the creative process.

This is the exact collection you want by this piano master- the albums straight across with no bonus tracks or mixed up collections. These are his 16 albums- period! Plus it is a great price for this. If you don't own this and want to check out some great jazz from this period, this is the collection to get.

If you're actually considering buying this, it's a fairly safe assumption that you're at least vaguely familiar with Thelonious Monk's music (if you're not but want to be,  Monk's Dream  got me into him and is as good a place to start as any). So I'll be fairly brief about the specific contents, as opposed to the overall quality. Purely in quantity terms, there are 16 CDs, containing 16 individual albums which were the entire output of his 6 years with Riverside, although some of the later reissues may have more out-takes. The music could certainly have been fitted onto a lot less CDs - 8 or 9 probably - but it's nice to have each album on a separate CD, although the covers and track listings are only to be found in the booklet. Of these 16 albums, 7 are live recordings, all of good to excellent recording quality. Of the 9 studio efforts, the first 2 contain no Monk compositions. Another 2 feature Monk unaccompanied.So all flavours of Monk are here - playing standards (including, on his Riverside debut, a whole album of trio arrangements of Duke Ellington tunes); forcing bands through wickedly difficult new compositions (the extraordinary "Brilliant Corners"); reinventing his older ones both live and in the studio; playing with stellar sidemen (Coltrane, Rollins, Mulligan, Blakey, Roach); playing solo (an incredibly intimate experience, especially on the masterful "Alone In San Francisco"); with a 10-piece band ("At Town Hall"); even letting another soloist completely off the leash live (Johnny Griffin on "Misterioso" and "Thelonious In Action", both from the same gig or gigs at the Five Spot).The 2 albums of standards were supposedly designed to introduce the pianist with the difficult reputation to the more general public with a bunch of familiar tunes. It seems to have worked as Monk's Riverside period (1955-61) was where he began to make a decent living - helped by the fact that he got his cabaret card back around the time he signed to Riverside and could play live in New York again, gradually moving from club to prestigious concert hall gigs - and laid the groundwork for his rise to stardom in the early 1960s. And while the preceding Blue Note and Prestige tenures introduced the world to a high proportion of his extraordinary compositions, he was still very productive in this period both in terms of new tunes and of reimaginings of his older ones, as well as of standards. For anyone who's "got" Monk (an acquired taste, but boy is it worth acquiring!) about half of this is absolutely essential and the remainder is at worst very good - in other words these albums all merit at least 4 stars individually.In terms of packaging, this set is minimal but good quality - 4 x 4 CD double jewel cases in a cardboard slip case, with a booklet containing track listings, recording & personnel details and album front covers. It's worth noting, given how infernally easy it is for such jewel cases to be damaged, that mine arrived (and still is!) completely intact - obviously made of tougher plastic than, for instance, the sometimes rather dodgy "8 Classic Albums" series.Given that this is a completely kosher product of Universal Music (their Italian branch, to be precise) issued in 2010 I'm a little puzzled as to why they haven't used the more recent remasters that are available for many of these albums - these date from between 1987 (no less than 7 of the albums) and 1995. But the original masterings were entirely respectable of their time and some of the albums seem to be out of print at the moment.And finally ... if you like this stuff, then you've got to have more from the same period, both from 1957 in fact:  Art Blakey'S Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk  is a Monk album in all but name - all but one of the tunes are his and Blakey played on many other Monk recordings - and  Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall , unearthed only a few years ago and issued on Blue Note, is one of his greatest live recordings. Monk's DreamArt Blakey'S Jazz Messengers With Thelonious MonkThelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall

These are 16 albums, all as originally released by Riverside.Why didn't they put them into cardboard sleeves as they did with the Complete Riverside Recordings reissue recently?In this version they put the 16 discs into 4 x 4-CD jewel cases, very unwieldly.You get a small booklet with the personnel and they put titles on the discs!Oh well, 5 stars for the music, no stars for the packaging.

Questo cofanetto raccoglie tutti gli album incisi da Monk a partire dai primi anni '50 fino ai primi '60 per l'etichetta Riverside, ovvero il suo momento più felice a livello creativo.si tratta di questi 16 album:- Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington- The Unique Thelonious Monk- Brilliant Corners- Thelonious Himself- Monk's Music- Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane- Mulligan Meets Monk- Thelonious In Action- Misterioso- At Town Hall- 5 By Monk By 5- Thelonious Alone In San Francisco- At The Blackhawk- Monk In France- Thelonious Monk In Italy- San Francisco HolidaySi parte con due album di standard pubblicati per stemperare la durezza e l'ermetismo del Monk compositore presentandolo in veste di pianista. Uno è interamente dedicato alle composizioni di Ellington, l'altro a vari standard. Entrambi sono suonati in trio.I rimanenti album sono tra le più belle incisioni di Monk, accompagnato da musicisti eccellenti come Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Gerry Mulligan, solo per citarne alcuni.Sono presenti anche gli album Thelonious Himself e Alone in San Francisco, secondo me i più riusciti dischi incisi "a solo" dal piansita senza nessun altro musicista ad accompagnarlo (salvo una breve comparsata di Coltrane in una traccia).Metà degli album contiene materiale inciso in studio e metà è repertorio dal vivo.Qualche momento poco felice è presente in alcuni degli ultimi 3 album; soprattutto in "Monk in Italy". In cambio, ci sono gli splendidi "Thelonious in Action" e "Misterioso" che raccolgono entrambi la musica incisa al Blackhawk in compagnia di Johnny Griffin nell'agosto del 1958 e "Monk at Town Hall": una rara occasione per sentire il pianista dal vivo con un'orchestra.A parte pochi momenti, nei live dell'ultimo periodo (già citati sopra), è tutto eccellente e il cofanetto vale la spesa.Il reperetorio non è assolutamente ripetitivo perché ogni singola interpretazione è sempre interessante e diversa dalle precedenti, anche quando si tratta degli stessi pezzi riproposti (da formazioni diverse e con approcci diversi) nel corso degli anni. Monk si rinnova ogni volta che si mette al piano.Insieme al cofanetto delle incisioni per la Prestige (della stessa epoca di queste sessioni) questo è il miglior Monk che possiate sentire.La qualità sonora è ottima. I CD contenuti nel cofanetto sono gli stessi che uscirono nel corso degli anni '90 / 2000 come riedizioni rimasterizzate degli album. Sono stati "inscatolati" nella nuova veste del cofanetto ma sono perfettamente identici agli album presi singolarmente: suono non compresso e bonustracks comprese (1 o 2 alternate takes quasi in ogni disco, più la lunga sessione di prova - di oltre 20 minuti - di Round Midnight in "Thelonious Himself").Pur avendo già quasi tutti questi dischi da vent'anni l'ho comprato comunque per quei 4 o 5 album che mi mancavano e se vi mancasse anche solo la metà di questi album il prezzo dovrebbe farvi passare ogni dubbio a riguardo. E' da prendere!Pro e contro rispetto a "The Complete Riverside Recordings":Rispetto al cofanetto simile "The Complete Riverside Recordings" questo "The Riverside Albums" ha il pregio di mantenere ogni album su un CD distinto. L'altro cofanetto è più completo perché ripesca anche qualche altra incisione qui mancante e il libretto è più esaustivo nelle informazioni e più esteso nell'apparato critico. In questo cofanetto c'è solo un libretto di poche pagine con: titoli, nomi dei musicisti, data di incisione e riproduzione della copertina di ogni album.Il prezzo di "the Complete R. R." è leggermente più alto e il materiale aggiuntivo non è poi molto; inoltre la scaletta degli album viene spalmata sui CD e diventa impossibile ascoltare un album nella sua integrità.Ora "the Riverside Albums" è arrivato (...da poco più di 20 euro quando lo acquistai io qualche mese fa) a circa 40 euro e la differenza di prezzo con l'altro cofanetto non è più abissale come prima.Non saprei quale ritenere migliore tra le due raccolte. sono comunque da 5 stelle entrambe.

There are two CD sets depicting Thelonious Monk's stay at Riverside Records. This one, All Monk, which gives you strictly the contents of the original 16 LPs as originally issued on Riverside. This means you get 39 to 42 minutes CDs (except the last one, at 69 min.), but in the original order as they were designed to be heard by the Riverside team, including Monk himself. Then there is that other set of Thelonious Monk: The Complete Riverside Recordings which, in 15 full to-the-brim CDs, proceed to give you all of the alternate takes as well as the complete originals (which are included in All Monk), but in the order of the original sessions, which differs from the order of the original LPs. A true Monk afficionado will go for the Complete Recordings set which contains much more, while many will be satisfied by this All Monk set.

Zur Zusammenstellung der Alben und zu Musik/Klang möchte ich nichts schreiben - beides ist schlichtweg hervorragend! Inzwischen wird die Box aber in einer anderen Version ausgeliefert als oben abgebildet: Die CDs befinden sich nicht in vier Jewel Case-Boxen, sondern in einzelnen Mini-LP-Hüllen, die auf der Vorderseite das ursprüngliche Cover des jeweiligen Albums abbilden. Die Rückseiten sind einheitlich gestaltet, d. h. es wird nicht das originale Backcover wiedergegeben wie bei Mini-LP-Replicas. Für Sammler stellt die neue Version dennoch eine deutliche Aufwertung dar, offensichtlich hat das Label die vielfache Kritik an den Jewel-Case-Boxen wahrgenommen. Dringende Empfehlung!