Monk: The Lost Files

Drummer Clarence Penn's latest is a super hip and contemporary update on eleven Monk tunes. Along with saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, pianist Vega, bassist Yasuhi Nakamura, and Gerald Clayton on Rhodes for one track, Penn reworked Monk's tunes - sometimes shifting accents to create a new rhythmic feel, or disguising the tune altogether. In doing so, he has breathed fresh life into and offered new ways to hear compositions that everybody knows and that have been played to death - No easy feat.