More of the Music of Thelonious Monk
- Boasting two KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, this vintage reissue pressing could not be beat
- Charlie Rouse – featured on many of the tracks here – is particularly wonderful on sax. His saxophone is full-bodied and natural with breathy texture and just the right amount of honk
- So many copies just sound like an old jazz record, but this one lets you feel like you are right there as the music happens
- As is sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs, there are marks that play – those on “Easy Street” are especially bad – but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind
- 4 1/2 stars: “The instantly recognizable stride piano lines are delivered with the same urgency and precision that they possessed over two decades earlier…”
This is an outstanding Monk album from 1968. Thanks to Columbia’s state of the art engineering — still using tubes I’d wager, based on the sound — the recording really comes to life, or at least it does on a copy that sounds as good as this one does.
Monk’s piano has powerful dynamics and real weight, just like a real piano.
So many copies just sound like an old jazz record, but this one lets you feel like you are right there as the music happens. What more could you ask for?
This vintage pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What The Best Sides Of Underground Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1968
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For On Underground
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks for the piano notes, not the smear and thickness so common to most LPs.
- Tight, full-bodied bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Side One
Thelonious
Ugly Beauty
Raise Four
Boo Boo’s Birthday
Side Two
Easy Street
Green Chimneys
In Walked Bud
AMG 4 1/2 Star Review
This release has long been considered Thelonious Monk’s acknowledgement to the flourishing youth-oriented subculture from whence the collection takes its name. Certainly the Grammy-winning cover art — which depicts Monk as a World War II French revolutionary toting an automatic weapon — gave the establishment more than the brilliant swinging sounds in the grooves to consider.
Underground became Monk’s penultimate studio album, as well as the final release to feature the ’60s quartet: Charlie Rouse (tenor sax), Ben Riley (drums), and Larry Gales (bass) behind Monk (piano). One of the motifs running throughout Monk’s recording career is the revisitation of titles from his voluminous back catalog. The tradition continues with the autobiographical leadoff track, “Thelonious.” The instantly recognizable stride piano lines are delivered with the same urgency and precision that they possessed over two decades earlier when he first recorded the track for Blue Note.
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