Monk’s peers in modern music, such as Parker, Gillespie, and Powell-who, as a teen-ager, studied with Monk-also composed, and their compositions quickly became widely performed by other musicians. Musicians, nonetheless, knew all along that he was a decisive creator of musical forms Teddy Hill, a bandleader who managed Minton’s, said, “Monk seemed more like the guy who manufactured the product rather than commercialized it.” As a result, his recordings were slower to come along-and, when they did, critics (which is to say, white critics) were even slower to appreciate them as more than merely idiosyncratic and eccentric. His style was no less difficult to achieve than those of his peers, but its brilliance was less evident even to ostensible cognoscenti. He traded speed for space, which he punctuated with percussive, angular figures that matched their distinctive harmonic complexity (and, sometimes, harmonic starkness) with extraordinary micro-timing and a variety of attacks. Whereas Parker, Gillespie, and the pianist Bud Powell were conspicuously virtuosic, their solos thrillingly outpacing lesser artists both in invention and execution, Monk, though no less skilled on his instrument, had a different way of showing it. (Another arrest, in 1958, after from his ejection from a hotel lobby in Jim Crow-enforcing Delaware, led to yet another suspension from club dates.) At the same time, Monk endured the widespread rejection of critics and audiences, who long failed to recognize his greatness, whether in public performances or on records, even as his peers from Minton’s were widely acclaimed. New York had a law at the time requiring club musicians to hold a police-issued “cabaret card,” which some, including Monk, lost after drug convictions (one for marijuana, another when he was wrongly charged), resulting in Monk being barred from jazz clubs for many years. Some reasons are bitterly practical and political. Though musicians had long been aware of his powerfully original ideas and performances, it wasn’t until a 1957 gig, at the Five Spot, in the East Village-where his main sideman was the saxophonist John Coltrane-that his central place in modern artistic life became widely acknowledged. Those musicians, and others in their circle, recorded copiously, starting in 1945, but Monk’s recorded output remained scant until the nineteen-fifties. Yet, while those musicians also had jobs with famous big bands, Monk-the house pianist at Minton’s-was composing, theorizing, and mentoring. He was one of the prime creators- the creator, he said-of modern jazz, i.e., bebop, alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, in the early nineteen-forties, most famously at jam sessions at a Harlem club called Minton’s. Monk, a pianist and composer, was fifty-one at the time of the concert. The album, scheduled for release in July from Impulse Records, was delayed, reportedly owing to contractual issues it will now be released on September 18th, on CD and vinyl by Impulse and digitally by Sony Legacy. “Palo Alto,” a new release of a previously unissued concert recording of Thelonious Monk and his quartet, from 1968, embodies some of the vexing paradoxes of his majestic artistry and his radically influential career.