Thelonious Monk died in 1982 at the relatively young age of 64, but he still lasted a lot longer than his friends and fellow bebop pioneers Charlie Parker, who died aged 34 in 1955, and Bud Powell, at 41 in 1966.
Monk didn't have the drug and alcohol problems Parker and Powell shared, but he had a debilitating and probably misdiagnosed mental illness in common with Powell and, by his son T.S. Monk's account, this worsened as the 1960s wore on.
By 1969, when Monk senior played a concert which was recorded for television at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, he was also dealing with problems with his record company, Columbia, which was about to drop him, and difficulty in holding a regular band together.
It's remarkable, given those circumstances, that the music from that concert, now issued in the Blue Note CD/DVD package Thelonious Monk, Paris 1969, is as good as it is. Still, it's not quite a lost treasure in the way the rediscovered 1957 Library of Congress recording which produced 2005's Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall album is.
Music from the Paris gig is presented here for the first time in full in both audio and video format, taken directly from the original recordings. Unfortunately, they were chopped up for broadcast as two half-hour television programmes, and some footage was lost in the process.
For this release the concert has been re-edited into something like chronological order for the CD, with a different order for the DVD, each in a way the producers believe offers a more cohesive feel of the concert.
An extraordinarily maladroit post-concert TV interview on the DVD makes it clear the people who filmed this were interested in Monk's role in jazz history, and not at all in the music he was making that night, but although received wisdom is that by 1969 he was well past his best, some of the playing here suggests otherwise.