Monk at Palo Alto: The Tape That Slept 50 Years

Jaime Roque follows a lost concert that almost never happened—and the homemade tape that kept it alive.

The story begins in 1968 with a teenager who can’t get into jazz clubs and decides to bring Thelonious Monk to his public-school auditorium instead. Tickets lag in mostly-white Palo Alto, so he turns to nearby East Palo Alto and invites neighbors who actually know the music. On a rainy Sunday, a school janitor tunes the piano, sets up a reel-to-reel, and hits record. The concert fills. The night is calm. Then the tape disappears into a box for decades.

From there, the episode tracks how a forgotten spool becomes a record the world can hear. Jaime visits the GRI at the Getty to see how fragile tapes are assessed, cleaned, and safely played back—how cleaning cloths, aging machines, and careful hands can turn a closet keepsake into public memory. And with a jazz scholar’s ear, he listens for why this set matters: the character of Monk’s touch that night and how a public-school stage becomes a time capsule.

Jaime asks what it takes to keep culture from slipping away—and how one Sunday afternoon can carry forward, beautifully, half a century later.

Special thanks to Danny Scher, Dr. Ron McCurdy, Jonathan Furnanski, and Thelonius Monk.