ReCurrent Season Two: Monk at Palo Alto

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Announcer: This is a Getty Podcast.

Jaime Roque: It’s 2018. We’re in T.S. Monk’s living room. Across from him sits Danny Scher, who helped stage Thelonious Monk’s 1968 Palo Alto High concert. He’s brought a 50-year-old tape of that show—a recording few have heard—and the school program Thelonious signed that Sunday. At saxophonist Jimmy Heath’s urging, Danny is here to play the tape for the son.

Danny Scher: The day of the concert—Monk, I had him sign a program for me.

His wife says to T. S., “Look, T. S., another phony Monk signature.” And I knew it wasn’t. And T. S. said, “Oh no, honey. That’s how he signed his name when he was feeling good, let’s listen to this.” From the minute we put it on, he knew his father was up.

Roque: Hello my name is Jaime, and welcome to ReCurrent.

[in a microphone] Testing—one, two…

Today I’m in Berkeley, on my way to visit Danny Scher at his place. I want to hear the story behind this unlikely recording of a jazz great.

Scher: [on the phone] Hi. Come on up the driveway.

Roque: Okay, sounds great—I’ll head up that way.

Scher: Hi!

Roque: Hey Danny, how you doing?

[over background chatter] The walls in Danny’s office are loud—vibrant colored posters, venue art, and concert backstage passes. He moves from poster to poster, telling me how he booked this one, how he salvaged that one—the wall’s a timeline of shows he pulled off. For two decades, he worked with Bill Graham, the Bay Area’s legendary concert promoter, the force behind the Fillmore and the modern rock show. Danny helped turn the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View into the region’s summer hub: a massive outdoor pavilion where the biggest tours and radio festivals stop by default.

Scher: I ran the concert division. I did over 8,000 shows.

Roque: But the beginnings of what would be a successful career started long before Shoreline—before Bill.

[Energetic percussion music begins]

Scher: I’m Danny Scher. I listened to music my whole life and was a drummer. In the high school outdoor amphitheater we set up with a friend of mine a sound system. And so during lunch we would play music and we called it Radio X. I had the show on Thursdays, so it was a Thursday afternoon of jazz. We printed up stationery that said Radio X, Palo Alto High School, this address, and I started sending those letters to the record companies trying to get promotional albums that we could play on Radio X.

Roque: Would they send you stuff?

Scher: Yes. [both laugh]

Roque: That’s amazing.

Scher: [laughing] That’s how I learned to get free music, you know.

Roque: [over background chatter] Scoring free records flipped a switch—if he could bring the music to lunch hour, why not bring the musicians to campus? You see, Danny was a huge music nerd, and he wanted to see his heroes up close. There was just one problem, he was too young.

Scher: At the time, jazz clubs were really bars and you had to be 21 to get in.

Roque: Danny couldn’t get into the clubs to hear the jazz he loved—but he found another way in.

[Jazz music begins]

Roque: Luckily, Danny Scher wasn’t just a jazz-obsessed, makeshift, radio DJ—he was also Palo Alto High’s elected social commissioner, the teenager in charge of dances and assemblies.

He quickly realized he could leverage this student position to try and put on his own version of the shows he was locked out of. He started dialing Bay Area Jazz players—and he eventually started getting some yeses, even landing Vince Guaraldi, the pianist behind the Peanuts soundtracks.

Scher: I called them up—I was 15 years old—and asked if they would do a concert at my high school. And they both said yes, and we paid them. And I had a contract and I had the principal sign it. But it was Vince Guaraldi, who I’m talking to on the phone, and he said, have you ever put on a concert before? And I said, no, but I’ve been to a lot. He said, well, why don’t you come up to my house and I’ll give you a little lesson on how to put on a concert.

[Bass guitar music begins]

Roque: So, Danny learns the basics of concert promotion from legendary musician Vince Guaraldi.

Scher: He picked me up, took me to his house, put me in the basement, you know, with his stuff. Said, okay, kid, here’s an example of a press release, you know? Keep it to one page. Say who, what, where, when…don’t make it difficult for people to read.

So I did the concert with him and John Hendricks. When I look at that concert today, I look at…I see—boy, how amateur I was, how I didn't know any…you know? [laughs] I didn’t have a stage. I had them playing underneath the basketball hoop. [laughs] The piano was an upright piano, I didn’t even know about baby grands or grands.

Roque: Landing Vince Guaraldi was a rush for Danny.

Scher: And the show did really well. And it was really, in a way, it was that concert that made me want to become a concert promoter.

Roque: After that early success, Danny sets his sights high. He sets them on Thelonious Monk.

[Upbeat saxophone music begins]

Roque: By ’68, Monk was a bona fide jazz icon—Time magazine cover, Columbia Records headliner—so booking him for a high-school gym was a pretty far stretch.

Danny saw Monk would be playing in San Francisco: the perfect chance, and maybe only chance, for Danny to book him.

Scher: I called his manager, an agent, and said I’d like to produce Thelonious Monk at my high school.

Roque: He talks like a pro, says all the right things, and a contract arrives, photos, bios. There’s just one problem: tickets aren’t moving.

At school, some people didn’t take Danny seriously.

Scher: I was considered in the school kind of a nut. So, let’s see what the nut’s doing this time.

Roque: The problem was more than just Danny’s reputation.

Scher: So, the show was not selling at all. Also the times. At my high school, no one knew who Thelonious Monk was. We had, I think, four Black Americans at the high school out of 1200 kids.

Roque: Even as jazz helped break down racial barriers in entertainment in the US, the audience for Jass was largely still segregated. The crowd could still split along racial and neighborhood lines. So Danny decides to go to East Palo Alto—a predominantly Black community—to drum up interest in hopes of increasing ticket sales.

[Slow Jazz music begins]

Scher: Now this was 1968, the height of the Vietnam War. I lived in a predominantly white community, Palo Alto, across the highway from a predominantly Black community, East Palo Alto. There was a lot of racial tensions. At that time, East Palo Alto was trying to change its name from East Palo Alto to Nairobi. And the election was a week after the concert.

I’m taking my bicycle in East Palo Alto. There were posters all over town: “Vote yes on Nairobi”. And I put my ad: “and come and see Thelonious Monk at Palo Alto High School”.

The police were coming—they would see me putting up posters and they’d say, hey white boy, this is not a safe place for you. You’re gonna get in trouble here putting up posters.

And I said I’m gonna be in bigger trouble if people don’t come to the concert. So I’d say, okay, I’m leaving. And I’d look at the police and they’d drive up the street and make a left, and I’d ride my bicycle and make a right.

Roque: He keeps flyering anyway, working the neighborhood where he thinks the interest is, even with warnings.

Scher: No one believed that Monk was gonna come to lily-white Palo Alto. I said, then don’t buy a ticket. Come and hang—come to the,you know, in the parking lot. And when you see Monk buy a ticket.

Roque: Meanwhile, Danny needs a guarantee—money to pay the band even if seats stay empty.

Scher: So I went to all of these stores that people knew me and sold them ads—which became the program—if no one showed up, I’d at least have enough money to pay Monk.

Roque: Then, two days before the show, another problem.

Scher: So the Friday before the Sunday concert, I called Monk at the club. He said, “What are you talking about?”

Scher: I said, “Well, I have a concert—you’re playing at my high school concert.” He said, “I don’t know anything about that.” And I mentioned all the right names he gave me, I have a contract. And he sent me bios and we have albums and we’ve been advertising you at our school radio station, Radio X [laughs] and he said, well, how am I gonna get there?

Roque: In true Danny fashion, he comes up with a solution.

Scher: My brother was old enough to drive to San Francisco so he can get you. He said, “Okay.” So my brother went and picked him up. I never told anyone that Monk didn't even know about the show until two days before.

Roque: Then, showtime. [rain sounds] A wet Sunday in late October, 1968. Palo Alto High. Center stage: the school’s acoustic piano. The program boasts some local opening acts, then Thelonious Monk, piano, Charlie Rouse, tenor sax, Larry Gales, bass, and Ben Riley, drums.

Scher: My brother pulls up and I remember the bass is sticking out. Everyone lines up, they buy their tickets, the show sells out.

Roque: The kid who couldn’t get into a bar just booked a sold out show with Thelonious Monk for his high school.

[Quick percussion music]

Ron McCurdy: I’m Dr. Ron McCurdy—Professor of Jazz Studies at USC’s Thornton School of Music, and Associate Dean for Community, Culture & Impact.

Roque: To understand just what a big deal this concert was, I spoke with Dr. McCurdy. He’s also the former director of the Thelonious Monk Institute at USC. I ask him to describe Monk and what he means to the jazz world.

McCurdy: Genius.Thelonius Monk was someone who challenged the musical status quo. He was an individual. He was unique in everything and how he approached the music from every facet of music.

His approach to harmony and composition was truly his own voice.

[Jazz music plays]

When you mention Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk’s name is mentioned in that same sentence.

When you listen to Monk, you can hear the whole history of jazz—Scott Joplin, James P. Johnson, stride piano, the boogie-woogie of Fats Waller—all those styles manifested themselves in his playing.

[Jazz piano music plays]

How he played—he was so soulful and so individualistic that people had to pay attention to him.

Roque: Even for Dr. McCurdy, the recording from Danny’s High School auditorium concert is special.

McCurdy: I began to realize just how spontaneous that recording was in terms of how the musicians played. And so you don't hold back. You don’t, you don’t say, well, I’m just playing for just a few people. This is not a big deal. You play like this, like your life depends on it. So I could hear the urgency in how the music was approached on that particular recording, but that was emblematic of Monk.

[Jazz piano music plays]

Scher: Everything was a little faster than normal.

[Quick Jazz music continues]

McCurdy: Thelonius Monk had a very percussive approach to playing the piano. He would almost bang on the piano in a way that other pianists would not do. He would sometimes be playing and there would be long periods of silence where he would get up and dance around the piano while in the middle of his own solo. And that kind of approach to the music was unique.

Roque: That’s the music. And here’s why we can still hear it: a small stroke of luck and a simple yes.

Scher: That afternoon the janitor said, can I record the concert?  I remember he did tune the piano. ’Cause that was kind of the deal, I’ll tune the piano, if you let me record the concert. I said, okay. Yeah. I gave him a reel to reel tape, which is what you had then. 

Roque: The wild part? We still don’t know the janitor’s name. But because he hit record, we get to be in that room every time we press play.

McCurdy: My guess is the custodian that he probably was a musician and back in those days, I mean, a lot of people that we revere now, they had other jobs. Because Jazz was like crime. It didn’t pay [laughs] you know? So I wouldn’t be surprised. I know people like J.J. Johnson, a great trombone player. He had a day job working in the post office. The janitor, who actually oversaw the recording, was probably a musician who understood the mic placement, who understood, you know, how you can’t have the mic too close with the drum ’cause all you’re going to hear is drums on the recording.

Scher: After the concert the janitor gives me the tape.

McCurdy: It made a great recording, man. Like one of the classic recordings that Thelonious made was that particular Palo Alto recording.  I mean, all these songs had a message to them, sometimes there was a story attached to his songs. “Ruby, My Dear” was about his wife. He loved his wife, you know, so he was gonna write a beautiful melody to pay homage to her.

[Soft saxophone and piano music plays]

And Monk was not a man of a lot of words. Sometimes he would have a concert and not say anything. The whole concert he just played, he let his music do the talking for him. And so I think…again, that’s one of the magical aspects of him, that he was such a unique individual. One of the greatest Creole’s we've ever had in terms of storytelling in a nonverbal way.

As we live, so do we sing, which means, what’s happening in the world politically, economically, socially manifests itself in the music.

[Saxophone music plays]

Roque: Outside, people were divided—Palo Alto mostly white, East Palo Alto mostly Black, and a vote on whether to rename the town “Nairobi” just days away. But inside that public-school auditorium, people from both towns, black and white, sat shoulder to shoulder and listened. No speeches. No scuffles. Just Monk’s band holding the room.

Scher: Music reunites people. Politics divide people—music brings us together.

Roque: After Palo Alto, Monk kept working with this quartet before retreating from the stage in the mid-’70s. His legend endured—his songs became standards and his touch a dialect every Jazz pianist learns.

McCurdy: I mean, I don’t know anybody who can call themselves a legitimate jazz musician and not have been influenced by the music of Thelonious Monk, whether it be from a harmonic standpoint or a rhythmic standpoint. That simple. He was that powerful.

Roque: Danny moves on too. He soon graduates high school and goes on to become one of the most successful concert promoters on the west coast. Even so, he keeps the old reel-to-reel tape of his first big get.

After 24 years of a career running massive venues, Danny decides to slow down a bit from producing concerts and builds something personal: a small amphitheater in his backyard.

Scher: I only use it to raise money for organizations and causes that I support.

Roque: And then in one of those concerts, Danny’s past comes up again.

Scher: I’m now working with Jimmy Heath, the Heath Brothers, and they played in my backyard here. And I was telling Jimmy that I have this tape of Monk at my high school. And he said, well, does T.S. Monk know about it? His son? I said, I don’t know.

I called T.S. and I said I produced your father in high school. He said my father never played a high school concert. And he said the only high school concert he was ever gonna play was mine. And then after he was on the cover of Time magazine, they canceled it. I said, well, I have a copy of the concert, can I play it for you? So he said, yeah, come by the house.

So I go to T.S.’s house and his wife answers the door, and I show her the program. So the day of the concert, Monk, I had him sign a program for me and I said here’s the program that he signed for me. And then T.S. comes down and his wife says to T.S., oh look T.S. another phony Monk signature. And I knew it wasn’t. And T.S. said, oh no, honey. That’s how he signed his name when he was feeling good. Let’s listen to this. And from the minute we put it on, he knew his father was up.

Roque: A son recognizes his dad’s touch right away. Which brings us to the reel—how it made it from that night, to T.S.’s living room, to now.

Scher: I kept the tape in a box for 50 years. I didn’t think it was valuable as much as it just…it was emotional to me, you know. It meant something to me.

[Piano music begins]

Roque: Sentiment kept the tape alive—first from Danny, then from one hand to the next, the tape of that night passing quietly between them, each person keeping a trace of it alive. And they don’t think of themselves as archivists at all. They aren’t; that’s a profession. They’re neighbors and students who hold onto a program, a reel, a note on a box. Because those items survive, archivists can later catalog, preserve, and share them. To learn how this chance recording becomes something the public can hear, I go to the Getty Research Institute.

[Door opens. Roque greets Furmanski]

Jonathan Furmanski: “My name is Jonathan Furmanski, I am the associate conservator specializing in audiovisual time-based media at the Getty Research Institute.

Roque: Audiovisual time-based media basically means recordings done on all kinds of media, from reel-to-reel, to cassette, to CDs and DVDs. Before archival reel-to-reel tape like this Monk recording can breathe in public, people like Jonathan in A/V labs check the body.

Furmanski: The first thing I would do is, I would smell it, ’cause that can tell you any number of things. It could smell like vinegar which means that it’s a piece of acetate tape. Or it could smell like mildew or mold, smell like smoke.

Roque: The storage environment also leaves some clues.

Furmanski: Moisture is kind of the enemy of all things magnetic tape-wise. All things like to be sort of dry and reasonably cool. So if things are warm and wet, that’s always gonna tip you off. Or if they're just been stored in a dank basement, you know, here in Southern California, that's just as bad.

Roque: If the reel’s stable, then the bench work begins—clear the surface, protect the deck, and make a safe path to playback.

Furmanski:
 We have tape cleaning machines that sort of spool the tape past a sort of non-linting cloth that basically cleans, wipes the surface clean. Because of the nature of magnetic tape, you can kind of take off the first layer—you can kind of shave off the stubble on the surface of it and still be able to get a really clean playback. And that stubbly surface that we’re cleaning off would otherwise clog the device that we’re playing it back on.

Roque: So how do you play a 60-year-old reel today?

Furmanski: In order to play back a 60-year-old piece of tape, you need a 60-year-old tape recorder.

Roque: So, the big question… what are the odds this makeshift recording makes it 50 plus years?

Furmanski: It sounds like it was a real unicorn in that you had this mysterious technician who set up their recording because there is a lot of amateur recordings in archives, and they are lovely and they are important and wonderful, but especially when you are dealing with music… there is a nuance and a sophistication to where you put a mic in relation to a kick-drum. And then what happens after that? Oftentimes just being forgotten is sometimes the best thing. Like if it’s just sitting in a box in a nice, dry attic somewhere… if it got passed around and shared, there’s a chance it might have gotten duplicated. And, you know, again, duplication is preservation, but it’s also a chance that it would get worn out. The fact that it came off the reel and just went into a box and stayed in one place, and it didn’t get shipped across the country where it could have gotten lost or somebody spilled a beer on it. None of those things happened because it wasn’t thought of as important. You could make the argument that that was the best thing that happened to it.”

Roque: The lab doesn’t create the heritage—it stabilizes what people already saved. A reel lives in a closet long enough, and suddenly the history in a place has sound again.

Preserving the tape is only half of getting it to the public. The other half is paperwork—permissions, contracts, signatures.

Scher: T. S. wanted to release it. Columbia Records said he was under contract with Columbia and we had no right to release it. Monk’s people said no, that contract had expired. Columbia showed a copy of a contract that Monk had signed, and because Monk had signed my program, they were able to compare the signatures and prove that the signature that they showed was not an actual Thelonious Monk signature.

Roque: Wow!

Scher: [laughs] It worked. Impulse released it, it worked.

Roque: When the record made from Danny Scher’s 1968 recording finally comes out, critics and radio don’t write it off as a novelty—they treat it like a record.

Scher: It was album of the year in DownBeat magazine. And I remember Rolling Stone gave it, I think, a rating number eight, above Paul McCartney who had number nine. Number one, it won historical jazz record of the year in Japan. If it’s a local station, they’ll say, ‘Here’s Danny Scher’s concert from 50 years ago.’ or more. [laughs]

Roque: What made it to vinyl isn’t just applause and solos—it’s a document: a rainy Sunday, a packed school auditorium, a town on edge finding two hours of common time.

And I keep coming back to what Danny said: “Music brings us together. Politics divide people.”

He still runs concerts that way—backyard shows included. A few dozen seats, students, parents, and neighbors side by side, brief intro, no speeches, then the band. The goal is simple: people from different backgrounds who don’t know each other stay and listen together.

Scher: So this one show I’m doing with this boogie-woogie piano, where they—two pianos, they play opposite each other. I’ve been looking for boogie-woogie piano players from Russia and the Ukraine to play with each other. Or Palestine and Israel. I would love to find a Democrat and a Republican boogie-woogie piano player. Maybe they only get along for a set and they go back to their old ways, okay, but at least for a set, there’s peace in the world.  And that’s what the Thelonious Monk concert was at Palo Alto.

Roque: When younger organizers ask how to start in the music industry, he keeps his advice simple.

Scher: Pick up the phone and write a letter. Knock on the door. That’s how you get in.

[Jazz music begins]

Roque: We imagine cultural heritage lives in vaults. But often, its preservation begins with a series of lucky encounters. The unlikely story of this Thelonious Monk album is built from ordinary care: a custodian who tuned the piano and hit record, and a teenager who saved the reel because it felt important. The recording preserves the performance; the context lives in the accompanying materials: the program with the date and lineup, the ticket stub with the price, and the concert poster created for the show.

In 1968, having a record of the night mattered. The world outside was loud; inside a high-school auditorium, there was a document of two hours of a community coming together. That’s what everyday stewardship can do: turn a night into a record the community can return to.

The pattern keeps repeating. Today’s flyers, playlists, pocket recordings—they’re tomorrow’s bridge back to this moment. Culture happens in the present; it becomes heritage when someone cares enough to keep the proof.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of ReCurrent. ReCurrent is written and produced by me, Jaime, with creative support from Zoe Goldman. Our executive producer is Christopher Sprinkle. For transcripts, images, and additional resources for this episode, visit getty dot edu slash podcast slash recurrent.