hoist the jazz flag, Michael Cuscuna's Blue Note secrets

money quote from a great Collector’s Weekly article with Cuscuna —

When you jump to the modern era, starting in ’47, the sessions with Thelonious Monk must have been fairly astonishing to hear. Even me hearing them 10 years later was astonishing. Monk was like this fully formed alien that had just landed on earth. The thing about Monk is that everything sounds wrong, but it’s absolutely perfectly right. It always sounds like it’s going to fall over the cliff, but it never does. Everything fits in place. It always works.