Thelonious Monk, the Teenage Weirdo, and the Battle Over a Lost Sonic Masterpiece

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HE GREATEST LOST CONCERT in American history almost never happened at all. It was Oct. 27, 1968, in Palo Alto, California. Outside of his high school, Danny Scher, a 16-year-old, bushy-haired, jazz-obsessed, self-described “weirdo,” was pacing the parking lot waiting for his hero, and music’s most elusive and enigmatic genius, to show up: composer and pianist Thelonious Monk.

To the disbelief of most everyone — including his mother and girlfriend waiting alongside him — Scher claimed to have booked the jazz legend for an afternoon gig, the modern equivalent of securing Kendrick Lamar for prom. Pulling this off at a nearly all-white school during his racially divided town’s explosive Civil Rights battle — when the predominantly Black community of East Palo Alto was fighting to rename itself “Nairobi” — made it even more unlikely. But the mixed crowd in the parking lot proved how music could bring them together. “It was really the only time I ever remember seeing that many Black people,” Scher recalls. “Everyone was just there to see Monk.”

During his 25 years working with famed concert promoter Bill Graham in San Francisco, Scher went on to book some of rock’s most legendary shows and created the storied Shoreline Amphitheatre. But as the precocious 73-year-old with wispy gray hair and glasses tells me one afternoon in his apartment overlooking Manhattan, his ultimate — and unlikeliest — production happened before he was old enough to drive. And it carries a powerful untold story, revealed now for the first time: how the same establishment that marginalized one of music’s most misunderstood virtuosos, Thelonious Monk, nearly silenced his greatest posthumous triumph.

If it hadn’t been for the high school custodian who taped Monk’s show, it would have been lost forever. When the long-lost recording finally came out five years ago, it earned rave reviews (Rolling Stone picked the “remarkable show” as a top-10 reissue of 2020), shot to the top of the Billboard jazz charts, and seemed a shoo-in for a Grammy. But the battle behind the scenes went deeper than anyone knew. “Record companies are still taking advantage of musicians,” Scher says. Or, as Monk’s 75-year-old son, drummer T.S. Monk, puts it, “They fucked him over.”

But thanks to a dusty reel-to-reel tape, a teenage dream, and a family’s fight for justice, Monk’s music — and legacy — won in the end. And it all started the moment Monk arrived for the gig that afternoon long ago. With great relief, Scher watched as his big brother, Les, pulled up in their parents’ car with Monk and the band. Larry Gales’ double bass was sticking out the window. Monk looked sharp as ever in his dark suit, a white collared shirt, a checkered newsboy cap, and shades. It was time for this show to begin.

ONE OTHER TIME THELONIOUS MONK had played a high school was to go to bat for T.S. It happened a few years earlier at the fancy boarding school in Connecticut where the musician had sent him. Monk didn’t want his son, as one of the few Black kids on campus, getting hassled.

One day, shortly after being hailed on the cover of Time, Monk showed up at the school in his limo and told his son, “‘Look, I’m gonna play a concert for the fucking school. They’re never gonna fucking throw you out,’” T.S. says. Soon after, when T.S. showed up to school in an Afro, they made him cut it and suspended him. “But they didn’t throw me out!” T.S. recalls with a laugh. We’re talking in his bustling home in New Jersey, where his family has convened for lunch. T.S., bald with a gold earring and gray goatee, slaps the table in approval of his dad’s deft moves. He says his father “knew the game!”

By the time of the “Paly High” show in 1968, Monk had been on top of the jazz game for more than 20 years. Since his breakthrough debut, The Genius of Modern Music Vol. 1, his cubist compositions and percussive piano had garnered international acclaim. “There is hardly a jazz musician playing who is not in some way indebted to him,” as Time wrote. Musician, composer, and die-hard fan Jon Batiste considers Monk decades ahead of his time. “It’s like somebody saying, ‘I’m going to take an engine from the 1930s and I’m going to do stuff to it that in 2025 is still considered state of the art,’” he tells me. “That’s the type of artistic mind that is in the 0.1 percent of humanity.”

But the “mad genius,” as Monk was often called, much to his chagrin, had a method behind him. Despite his off-kilter style, T.S. recalls, “he was very, very methodical. He really did his fucking work.” Few understood the grind behind the artistic brilliance: the obsessive repetition, the sleepless nights, the meticulous labor behind even a single bar of music. “I remember him going over this four-measure phrase all day and all night for weeks,” T.S. recalls. At the time, it sounded like nonsense to the boy. “I remember saying to myself, ‘What the hell is he writing?’” T.S. says. “‘This is going nowhere.’” But the bars became “Oska T.,” one of his standout tunes.

Even Monk’s theatricality was deliberate. He had handkerchiefs custom-made, four feet wide, that he’d stuff into his suit pocket and pull out halfway through a show like a magician. When he’d stand beside his piano and start spinning in circles, it wasn’t some strange mania as some suspected. He was dancing, doing a series of moves rooted in African dance steps passed down from his family in North Carolina.

His exaggerated movements at the piano — stabbing the keys and shuffling his feet — weren’t bizarre quirks. They came from church. Monk had spent years as a boy playing at Pentecostal revivals, where people spoke in tongues and collapsed onstage. His disjointed, dissonant rhythms were his attempt to accompany the chaos — like providing a real-time soundtrack to a strange silent movie. His dancing feet came from playing the organ as a child and working the pedals, a rhythm he never lost. He played his favorite game, pool, like he played music: precise, propulsive, and without mercy. T.S. never won a single game. Neither did John Coltrane, who once lost 59 out of 60 ping-pong matches in a single night.

But the same brilliance that elevated him isolated him. Monk’s sensitivity ran deep, even if the world mistook it for madness. He had an unusually hard time with death — so hard, he couldn’t bring himself to attend his own mother’s funeral. The deaths of Coltrane and Bud Powell devastated him. He was becoming more and more silent. One night, T.S. found his father standing by the kitchen sink staring blankly at the ceiling. “He seemed like he was in another world,” T.S. recalls. “I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I was terrified.”

Monk, the artist Coltrane had called “a musical architect of the highest order,” was struggling to keep his mind together. “Sometimes he doesn’t know exactly what he’s saying,” his wife Nellie told T.S. and his younger sister, Barbara, one day. “Sometimes he may not necessarily look like he recognizes you. We have to protect him. We have to look out for him, because if we don’t, nobody else will.”

“I got it all of a sudden,” T.S. recalls. “I realized that my mother was saying that Dad needs us and so don’t take it to heart when he goes off the deep end.”

The family didn’t know at the time that Monk was suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which could have been eased with proper treatment. But they faced an impossible obstacle. “We’re talking about America,” as T.S. puts it. “Mental illness among African Americans was not a priority.” One hospital wanted to give him shock treatment, until a friend intervened. Doctors overmedicated him on heavy sedatives such as Thorazine, dulling his faculties even further. The family feared what might come if they reached out again. “Their answer was lock him up, put him in a fucking straitjacket and sit his ass down,” T.S. says.

As Monk’s silent episodes mounted, so did his financial strains. With musical tastes changing, Monk’s records hadn’t been selling like they used to, and he had fallen into debt to his label, Columbia. In a pandering attempt to make Monk hip to the hippie generation, the label staged an elaborate cover shoot with him at a piano by a tied-up Nazi, bottles of wine, and what appeared to be a pirate. “They had a Sgt. Pepper’s kind of outfit for him to wear,” T.S. recalls. “But when he got to the set for that, he basically said, ‘Fuck that. I got my Brooks Brothers shit. What the fuck y’all talking about?’” He posed in his own anachronous suit on the cover, a cigarette dangling from his lip.

But Monk’s family doesn’t think he accepted Scher’s invite for the money or the marketing. It was something simpler. “He had a soft spot,” T.S. says. “I wasn’t surprised he agreed to play a concert for a kid.”

FOR AS LONG AS DANNY SCHER could remember, Palo Alto had been divided. On the west side of Highway 101 was Palo Alto proper, leafy home to Stanford University, the early nerds of Silicon Valley, and largely white. On the east side of the 101 was East Palo Alto, which was predominately Black. The two sides seldom mixed. As Scher recalls, “People in Palo Alto did not go to East Palo Alto.” But from a young age, Scher refused to be one of them. When the white and Black high schools swapped students for two weeks to foster community, he volunteered to be in the program. “I was in the minority,” he said. “It was fine.”

Best of all, there were more jazz fans in East Palo Alto like him. Scher had been listening to the music since his brother Les, a saxophone player, turned him on to it. Monk and Duke Ellington were his favorites. “It just spoke to me,” he says. “It was very accessible, but a little odd.” He adds, “I was a little off too.” While his classmates were listening to the Dead and the Stones, Scher was a jazzy percussionist in the marching band. At 15, he hitchhiked to the Monterey Jazz Festival, where he was among the only white kids. Too young to get into jazz clubs, he’d call them in advance and pretend to be a booking manager to get comped. “That way,” he says, “no one’s ever going to ask for your ID.”

One of six boys expected to follow his father into law practice, Scher chose music instead — despite his dad’s warning: “There’s no money in music. Go sell shoes.” After getting elected his high school’s “commissioner of social activities,” Scher wanted to book more than just homecoming dances and teacher talent shows, he wanted to book Monk. So the wannabe Bill Graham hatched a plan.

Monk was playing a residency at the Jazz Workshop, a club in San Francisco. The city was only 35 miles away. Maybe, Scher thought, Monk would be willing to come down for a Sunday-afternoon show. After tracking down the number of Monk’s manager, Harry Colomby, and calling him with the outrageous offer, he got an even more surprising response: Monk was in. Scher was duly mind-blown. But now he faced a new challenge, pulling off the show.

Using his student-activities funds and selling ads in the program to raise $500, Scher booked the gig for Sunday, Oct. 27, 1968. His principal signed the contract. But the question remained: Why would one of music’s most acclaimed and elusive virtuosos take a high school gig from this kid at all?

The kid promoting the Monk show, nonetheless, was having an unexpectedly hard time selling tickets. Despite Scher’s booking, few people believed that the world’s greatest jazz artist was really coming to town. To get the word out, Scher stuffed his newspaper-boy bag with rolled-up posters, and pedaled across Highway 101 to where he knew there were plenty of Monk fans like him: East Palo Alto.

It was a busy week for postering. After the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. that spring, local leaders and activists, inspired by the Black Power and Pan-African movements of the time, moved to rename their town after Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. With the vote scheduled for Nov. 5, the week after the Monk show, supporters and detractors had been plastering the area with flyers too. Tensions were high. Scher recalls a neighborhood cop seeing him taping up a poster. The cop warned him: “Hey, white boy, this isn’t a safe place for you. You’re going to get in trouble putting up posters.” Scher told him, “I’m going to be in bigger trouble if the show doesn’t do well.”

SCHER’S MOVE PAID OFF. With Black and white kids buying up the tickets, the show sold out. Two days before the gig, Scher called the jazz club where Monk was playing to go over details with his manager — only to hear Monk himself pick up the phone instead. There was just one thing more shocking than talking to his hero for the first time — realizing Monk didn’t know about the gig at all. As he told this kid on the phone, “What are you talking about?”

Scher’s heart raced. He did his best to coolly fill in Monk, who’d either not been told about the gig by his manager or lost track. “How am I going to get there?” the piano great replied. Scher didn’t have the budget for a limo, but he had something better: his older brother Les, who not only turned him on to Monk in the first place but also had a license. “My brother will pick you up!” Scher assured him. Yet without having received a fully executed contract back from Monk’s manager, he didn’t know if Monk would really show up at all.

After his brother pulled up with Monk and his band, Scher tried to play it cool. “I realized from my very first show, when I’m producing a concert, it’s not to be their friends,” he says.

He asked Monk, “You hungry?”

“I’m hungry,” Monk replied.

Scher dispatched his mom to go across the street for food. With no greenroom, Monk and the band settled in off the stage. Scher checked the school’s piano. One of the custodians, a Black man in his thirties, knew how to tune it and offered to set it up. A fan himself, he just wanted one thing in return. “If I tune the piano,” he said, “can I record the concert?” In all of Scher’s meticulous planning, he hadn’t thought about recording the show. But the custodian had access to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and knew how to operate it, too. “Yeah, OK,” Scher told him.

“I’ll give you the tape when it’s over,” the custodian promised.

From the moment Monk and his band walked onstage, this wasn’t like any gig before. T.S. Monk imagines his father would have been inspired by the mixed crowd and their placards for Nairobi. “He was always very aware of Civil Rights,” he says. “So I could see why that would be important to him.” Despite his own challenges, Monk didn’t just show up — he unleashed an unusually incendiary and explosive 47-minute set, from the opening shot of “Ruby, My Dear,” to the last stab of “I Love You Sweetheart of All of My Dreams.” Scher could only stand and watch in awe. “Everyone was thrilled,” he says. Even better, the young promoter felt he’d done his job. “The sound was good, the lights were good,” he recalls. “And the piano was tuned.”

Monk thanked the crowd, and said his only other words of the night: “We have another show to do.” Scher helped the band off the stage and make its way to his parents’ car. Monk seemed to have a good time, and Scher allowed himself one moment to be a fan: asking his idol to sign the night’s program. Monk wasn’t fond of autographs. “I don’t like to carry a pen on me,” he once said, “because somebody will say ‘Sign an autograph.’” But he made an exception for this bushy-haired kid. Then, just as magically as he arrived, he piled back into the car with the band, and with the bass sticking out a window, headed back to San Francisco.

Scher stood there watching the car fade like a dream, clutching his autographed program. Though the vote to rename East Palo Alto as Nairobi was lost the following week, Monk’s music had brought the town together. And Scher had the proof: the Ampex reel-to-reel tape the custodian had made of the show, handed over to Scher as promised. The 16-year-old went home and put it in a cardboard box. It would be 50 years before he heard it again.

DESPITE HIS FATHER’S WARNINGS, Scher proved he could be happier, and more successful, promoting concerts than selling shoes. He followed up the Monk gig with another momentous feat: booking Duke Ellington to play his school. He ended up befriending the great composer and becoming his driver whenever he was in town. After studying music at Stanford, Scher hustled the biggest gig of all: working for the greatest booker in town himself, Bill Graham. Though Scher never again saw Monk, who died of a stroke in 1982 at age 64, he cherished the memories — the autographed program and a copy of the show’s original poster. “This poster was always in my office,” he says.

But he’d never heard the custodian’s tape. The old reel-to-reel had been sitting in a box packed away until friends urged him to burn it onto a CD. When Scher popped it into his stereo, it was the first time he’d heard it since he was that bushy-haired 16-year-old listening from backstage. The custodian’s raw tape captured Monk’s performance in all its wonderful imperfections: the squeak of the piano bench as he shifted in his seat, the scratchy tap of his shoes swiping the piano pedals below. “It was really good,” Scher says. It had to come out.

Though Scher had never been in touch with Monk’s family, he figured they’d be as excited as him. But this time when he called, the Monk on the other end wasn’t so receptive. T.S. Monk was so used to hustlers pestering him about dubious Monk recordings that he gave Scher his usual response. “I said, ‘I don’t know who the fuck y’all are,’” he recalls with a laugh, “and we ain’t releasing nothing.”

When Scher brought the CD to T.S. Monk’s house to let him hear it, he watched closely as the son listened closely to the man he knew so well — as a musician, and a dad. In Monk’s later years, T.S. had backed him up as a drummer, too. After so long performing with his dad, and listening to countless live recordings, T.S. was the toughest critic of his father’s work. “Most live performances suck,” he says. But from the first note, he could tell this was no ordinary gig. “My father was feeling good,” he told Scher.

“How can you tell?” Scher asked.

“Because everything’s up, everything’s a little faster,” he said, pointing out the urgency of his father’s fingers, “and that’s when he felt good.” He bobbed along as his father attacked “Don’t Blame Me,” the 1932 pop standard. “He’s playing the living shit out of this tune,” T.S. told Scher. “The band is rocking!” It wasn’t just the performance that shook him. It was the story of the show, and how it humanized his father like nothing before. “I knew the story was as big as the record,” he recalls. “You got this 16-year-old white kid who picks up the phone and calls Thelonious Monk himself and says, ‘Mr. Monk, I want to hire you.’ And Thelonious Monk says, ‘OK, kid.’ I mean to me that was off the hook.” He knew his father would have wanted the world to hear it. “Hell yeah, no doubt,” T.S. says.

With Impulse Records on board, Thelonious Monk: Live at Palo Alto was slated to come out in July 2020. Scher, T.S. Monk, and the label prepared a lavish package for the vinyl release, including copies of the original program and poster. Impulse submitted it for six Grammy nominations.

But just as the advance raves were peaking two weeks before the release, they got a message from Monk’s old sparring partner: his label. Sony, owners of Columbia, claimed the tape was contractually theirs. “They were saying that this recording was made during the period that Thelonious was on the contract to Columbia, and therefore they owned it,” T.S. Monk says. (A Sony Music spokesperson tells me, “We don’t comment on confidential contractual details.”)

This wasn’t the first time the Monk estate had battled with Sony. In 2002, the estate conducted a forensic accounting of Monk’s catalog and discovered it was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the label. A settlement was reached in 2023. But now Sony was threatening to sue if the Palo Alto concert got released. Faced with a legal battle, Impulse pulled the LP. The momentum crashed. And with no way of knowing when or if the record would get released, the hypothetical Grammy nominations went away, too.

After searching through Monk’s old paperwork, T.S. and the estate confirmed what they had known to be true: Monk’s contract with Columbia had expired in 1967, a year before the Palo Alto High School show. Sony responded with another salvo: a contract extension through 1968 signed by Monk himself. But when his son eyed it 52 years later, he called bullshit. “That’s not my father’s signature,” he said. Scher— who had one of Monk’s rare autographs on his Palo Alto program — agreed. A forensic handwriting analyst confirmed their assessment. Sony seems to have decided this was a losing battle. According to T.S., the company soon settled the matter. Thelonious Monk: Live at Palo Alto eventually came out in September 2020.

Despite getting robbed of the momentum and the Grammy nominations, T.S. and Scher are happy the long-lost recording could finally be heard. “I know you think there’s a bias because he’s my father,” T.S. says with a smile, “but it’s not because he’s my father. It’s because he’s Monk. His music does the same thing to me as it does to everybody else.” For Scher, the legacy of the concert lives on, and so does his hero. He says, “I hear Monk every day.”