Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. If sidemen and backing musicians are the unsung heroes of music, and ...

What can you say about pianist Thelonious Monk? By the time these tracks were recorded, between '61 and '64, he had already amassed a body of work containing many tunes that had already become ...

Hackensack native Rudy Van Gelder, perhaps the most influential recording engineer in the jazz genre, who brought to vivid life the sounds of such legendary artists as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, ...

I saw the name before I heard the music: "Thelonious Monk is God" scratched into the plywood panelling of a mysteriously antiquated railway carriage, as if the train were coming from out of the past ...