The Card
Four new NEA Jazz Masters get a free tribute concert next Tuesday, and the calendar behind it runs through Coltrane's hundredth birthday to Monterey. Then Sekou tells the story of the police card that decided who could work a New York bandstand, and the night Thelonious Monk lost his.
LioraFour new Jazz Masters honored next Tuesday, for free. Two Blue Note records, one street date. And New York, 1951, the night Thelonious Monk lost his police card. It's Wednesday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Wednesday, September 9th. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: The NEA honors four new Jazz Masters at Walt Disney Concert Hall on September 15th
LioraFour new NEA Jazz Masters get their night next Tuesday.
The National Endowment for the Arts holds its 2026 Jazz Masters Tribute Concert on September 15th, eight o'clock Pacific, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The four are Carmen Lundy, Airto Moreira, Patrice Rushen, and Rhonda Hamilton, who receives the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy.
Two of the four plan to be in the room, Lundy and Hamilton. Moreira and Rushen cannot, so the concert builds performances around their music instead. Terri Lyne Carrington and Hubert Laws honor Rushen. Terreon Gully, Andrew Renfroe, Julius Rodriguez and Ben Williams play with Lundy.
It's free, with a live webcast, radio broadcasts, and an on-demand webcast at arts.gov.
LioraHere's the calendar it opens. Jazz at Lincoln Center runs Marsalis and the Masters, the 17th through the 19th. John Coltrane's hundredth birthday is the 23rd, and the Hollywood Bowl premieres Coltrane 100: Legacy that night. Monterey, the 69th, runs the 25th through the 27th. This weekend, before any of it, the Denton Arts and Jazz Festival in Texas, Friday through Sunday.
Two. Listen to This: Thelonious Monk's Genius of Modern Music, Volume Two
LioraToday's record comes out of tonight's Bridge. Thelonious Monk, Genius of Modern Music, Volume Two, on Blue Note.
Blue Note's own Monk page documents Volumes One and Two, cut across his years with the label. 1947 to 1948, then 1951 to 1952. Our Bridge lands inside that second stretch.
The tip. Play it after the Bridge, not before. Same notes either way, but you will be hearing a man who was about to lose the right to work a room.
Now the release desk. Impulse plans the Tiberi Tapes for this month, private club recordings of Coltrane that Frank Tiberi made between 1961 and 1965, never released. Two more from Blue Note, both dated September 25th. A Tone Poet reissue of Sonny Clark's The Art of the Trio, on two records, and Memory Bomb, billed as the pianist Kiefer's solo debut for the label.
LioraNew York, 1951. There was a card, about the size of a driver's license, and the police decided who kept one. Without it you could not work a club that served liquor. Tonight, the night Thelonious Monk lost his. Sekou has the story.
Three. The Bridge: New York, 1951, a police card that decided who could work a room that served liquor
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou, what have you got?
SekouA piece of paper. About the size of a driver's license. From 1940 until 1967, if you wanted to work in a New York nightclub that served liquor, you needed one. The police issued it. And the police could take it away.
LioraA license to play the piano.
SekouIn those rooms, yes. It was called the cabaret card. New York passed a cabaret law in 1926. By 1943 that firmly included musicians. Billie Holiday lost hers in 1947. She never got it back. For about twelve years, no New York nightclub serving liquor could legally book her.
And in August of 1951, the card caught Thelonious Monk.
LioraWhat happened?
SekouHere's the version you'll hear in every jazz bar in the world. Monk is sitting in a parked car with his friend Bud Powell. Police find heroin. It isn't Monk's. They ask him whose it is, he says nothing, and he takes the fall to protect his friend.
LioraThat's the story I know.
SekouIt's the story everyone knows, and it came from Monk's own family. But researchers went back to the records. August 8th, 1951. Five people in that car, not two. Police saw heroin thrown from the car and arrested everyone. Whose it was, the surviving records do not establish. Monk pleaded not guilty. And Bud Powell was not spared by anyone's silence. He was sent to an institution.
LioraSo the legend is... a legend.
SekouThe legend is a legend. What isn't in dispute is what it cost. Monk sat in jail about sixty days, got a sixty-day sentence credited as time served... and lost his cabaret card. For nearly six years, the most original piano player in New York could not hold a steady job in Manhattan's major nightclubs. The rooms where reputations were made.
LioraSix years. What did he do?
SekouHe was not silent. He played neighborhood rooms in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Harlem, where the card didn't reach. He gave concerts, turned up on television, and recorded: Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, including "Brilliant Corners" in 1956. His wife, Nellie, held the household together. She called that stretch "the un-years."
LioraThe un-years.
SekouHer words. And into those years walks Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Born a Rothschild, a baroness by marriage, she became Monk's close friend and one of his important supporters.
In 1957 the card came back. With help from her, from Monk's manager Harry Colomby, who fought the appeal, and from a club owner named Joe Termini, who vouched he would put Monk to work.
LioraSo where does he play?
SekouTermini's club. A small room on the Bowery called the Five Spot. He opened there on July 4th, 1957, with a trio. Two weeks later, on July 18th, a tenor player joined the band. A young man named John Coltrane.
LioraOh.
SekouYes. Coltrane said of playing with Monk, "You have to be awake all the time. You never know exactly what's going to happen." The run lasted to about Christmas. One of modern jazz's celebrated engagements, and it happened because a piece of paper came back.
LioraAnd the card itself?
SekouMayor John Lindsay signed the repeal on September 25th, 1967. Monk was 49. Billie Holiday had been gone eight years. And the cabaret law underneath it? New York didn't repeal that until 2017.
LioraSo the famous story is that he lost six years for keeping quiet. The real one is that whatever happened in that car, a piece of paper decided where Thelonious Monk was allowed to play. I think the real one is heavier.
That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: Delfeayo Marsalis and the Uptown Jazz Orchestra at Snug Harbor is tonight's ticket
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket first.
If I had one ticket tonight, it's New Orleans. Snug Harbor has Delfeayo Marsalis and the Uptown Jazz Orchestra, seven thirty and nine thirty, fifty two sixty a show. Come early and the same room has the Adonis Rose Septet with Melanie Scholtz at five.
LioraNow the sweep. In New York, Birdland runs four shows in two rooms: David Ostwald's Louis Armstrong Eternity Band at five thirty, the Emmet Cohen Trio at seven and nine thirty, and Frank Vignola's Guitar Night at eight thirty. Dizzy's has the Isaiah J. Thompson Trio at seven and nine. In Chicago, the Soul Message Trio holds the Jazz Showcase from eight to eleven, twenty five general admission. In Los Angeles, Catalina has a celebration of life for Tom Culver, doors seven, show eight thirty. In Minneapolis, Madeleine Peyroux plays the Dakota at seven.
Two rooms list nothing tonight. Scullers in Boston lists nothing until Arturo Sandoval tomorrow, MCG Jazz in Pittsburgh nothing until the 26th. Kansas City's Green Lady Lounge blocked every read with a bot check, so it stays out.
Five. One More Note: Elvin Jones was born on this date in 1927
LioraElvin Jones was born on this date in 1927, in Pontiac, Michigan. Six years in the John Coltrane Quartet, and an NEA Jazz Master himself in 2003. He was the youngest of ten siblings, two of them Hank Jones and Thad Jones.
Same date, 1958. The Miles Davis sextet, with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans in it, shared a Columbia Records evening at the Plaza Hotel with Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. That set came out fifteen years later as Jazz at the Plaza, Volume One.
Put on something with the drums up front.
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Wednesday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.