Qwest is "an extraordinary new trove of sixty-six concert films", with performances ranging from the nineteen-fifties through the nineteen-eighties, New Yorker reports. It is a streaming site and TV channel, founded in 2017 by Quincy Jones, featuring many of the twentieth-century heroes of Black music like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and James Brown, as well as some rarely seen jazz artists like Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal...

A great story about Thelonious Monk's 1968 Palo Alto high school concert came full circle. In the fall of the frantic 1960s, a 16-year-old high school student Danny Scher invited legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk to perform a show at his high school's auditorium in Palo Alto, California. White folk weren't buying the two-dollar tickets, so Scher opened up sales to the surrounding, poorer black folk so the concert turned out to be a great moment of jazz and unity. Luckily, the school's janitor recorded the performance and handed it to Scher who put it in his attic and it sat there for decades before he approached Monk's son, drummer T.S. Monk, who last week released it - "one of the best live recordings I've ever heard by Thelonious". PopMatters has the details.

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