The sound suffers occasionally from a bit of tape wobble, but all the instruments are recorded clearly and much of the playing is simply wonderful.

The sound and vision quality of a bonus DVD included in the package is dodgier, but this Norwegian television recording of the same lineup playing Lulu's Back in Town, Blue Monk and Round Midnight just over a year later in Oslo is still revealing.

'You haven't heard Monk until you've seen him,' says Dorn - obviously a fan - rather breathlessly, but he has a point. The idiosyncrasies of Monk's music do make more sense when you can see him, hands hovering over the keyboard for an improbably long time, waiting for the precise instant at which to place that carefully considered dissonant chord.

By the time these recordings were made, Monk had ceased to be regarded as a revolutionary and was one of the old guard. He wasn't composing much, but he continued to grow as a pianist, and he tackled both standards and his own ever-challenging themes with as much freshness and vigour as ever.

Live at the Olympia opens with a magnificently angular Rhythm-a-Ning before proceeding to a solo reconstruction of Body and Soul, an outstanding performance from Rouse on I Mean You, a brief solo canter through April in Paris in deference to the venue, and supercharged versions of Well You Needn't, Bright Mississippi and Epistrophy.

The partnership between Monk and Rouse is a particular joy to hear. Given the thankless task of following on from Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane with Monk, Rouse was thoughtlessly dismissed at the time for no better reason than that his predecessors had gone on to greater fame and to establish themselves as leaders.

He, by contrast, stayed with Monk for 11 years, from 1959 to 1970, and knew his music inside out - which, according to Coltrane at least, was the way you had to know it.

Monk himself, often accused of wilful eccentricity, always insisted that everything he played seemed perfectly logical to him, and Coltrane observed that 'everything fits so well in Monk's work once you get to see the inside'.

It was also Coltrane, who, as Nat Hentoff recalls in an excellent sleeve note, came offstage in New York after a set with the pianist looking dejected, and when asked why said, 'I got lost in one of Monk's compositions. It felt like falling down an elevator shaft.'

After a certain period of time Rouse didn't have that problem.

Unpredictable himself at all times, Monk expected his musicians to be the same, and Rouse could match him, quirk for apparent quirk, with impeccable musical logic. 'He thought if you practised the changes themselves you'd play the chords as such, and he didn't want to hear that,' Rouse later explained. 'He wanted you to experiment.'

This band certainly did that. The themes chosen for development are well worn, but Monk and Rouse come up with something new on every one of them, and Gales and Riley are clearly perfectly comfortable both in support and as soloists.

During his lifetime, Monk was often accused of 'not being part of a tradition', which he deeply resented. He knew he was. His music had direct links to Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington, and was deeply rooted in the blues. He was also knocked for his 'primitive' technique, but saxophonist Johnny Griffin insisted that he could play like Art Tatum if he wanted to.

He didn't want to, though. Monk believed in approaching things from different angles, and a story his wife, Nellie, told is revealing in that regard.

She had a phobia about pictures hanging crooked on the wall, and Monk took it on himself to cure this by nailing a clock in place, very slightly askew. 'We argued about it for two hours,' she recalled 'but he wouldn't let me change it. Finally I got used to it.'

Monk's music also takes some getting used to, and it always starts from a different angle, well exemplified by the playing on this set. 'The sound of surprise', indeed.