When a scrape with the law cost jazz pianist Thelonious Monk his New York nightclub licence in the mid-'60s, he went to Europe to make a living.
It wasn't the first time, nor was Monk the only jazz musician to cross the Atlantic to escape troubles at home. Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell, Eric Dolphy, Chet Baker and dozens of other jazz greats sought refuge in Europe, some of them staying for good.
And for good reason. Since the earliest days of jazz in the 1920s, American musicians had been treated like foreign dignitaries when they toured Europe.
Away from the snobbery and racism that kept jazz out of the mainstream and under the thumb of white record producers and club owners in the United States, the music found a place to flourish.
"In Europe they seemed to understand from the beginning that jazz was not some novelty but the classical music of the 20th century," Duke Ellington wrote about his orchestra's first trip to London in the early '30s. "We were treated as artists, not vaudeville acts."
On radio, and later on television, jazz concerts were regularly aired in their entirety for their cultural significance by Europe's state-run broadcasters, even though they had little commercial potential.
It happened twice to Monk on his 1966 trip to Europe, and those concerts -- in Norway and Denmark -- have been packaged on a historic DVD that's part of a terrific new nine-DVD set being sold by Naxos in North America under the title Jazz Icons.
None of the performances has been available before, even as bootlegs. They are being sold as an economically priced boxed set for roughly $200, or as individual DVDs for about $25.
Performances by Art Blakey the Jazz Messengers, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Rich, Chet Baker and Quincy Jones make up the rest of the riches plucked from the European vaults.
And they are just the first of dozens more vintage European jazz concerts to come, according to Phillip Galloway and David Peck, the producers behind the series. Concert DVDs of Charles Mingus with Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, all from the 1960s, are among those being prepared for release in 2007.
"It's hard to imagine how so much of this footage was forgotten for so long," says Galloway. "For the jazz fan it's like finding King Tut's tomb."
Through their company, Reelin' In The Years Productions, Galloway and Peck own the rights to the largest library of music footage in the world, about 10,000 hours of performances from all genres covering the last 50 years.
Most of the jazz footage, filmed live in TV studios and concert halls throughout Europe, has not been seen or heard since it was first broadcast, Galloway says, sometimes going back as far as the early '50s.
Some of it has not been viewed at all, including an exhilarating 1958 Blakey concert filmed for Belgian TV featuring a killer version of the Jazz Messengers -- with Lee Morgan, Benny Golson and Bobby Timmons -- that many fans consider the bebop drummer's greatest band.
"It's an unbelievable discovery," says Galloway.
"That group was only together for about six months. Who knows why it was taped and then never shown."
Until now, Galloway and Peck have been best known for their vintage blues, folk and soul DVDs.
Their American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1969 won a Grammy in 2004. Another much-praised DVD, Marvin Gaye: The Real Thing in Performance 1964-1981, was the first archival film anthology of a Motown artist.
Even so, the Jazz Icons series might end up being their most significant work.
Most of the rare jazz concert footage they discovered was taped between 1957 and 1966, an especially fertile era for jazz and a period that captures many of the musicians at their peaks.
"It was crucial to us to find the earliest concert footage we could in order to feature the artists as close to their prime as possible," says Galloway. For these first nine releases, he adds, it was also important to feature musicians "who in some significant way shaped the history of jazz.
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On both counts, they have mostly succeeded.
The Dizzy Gillespie DVD, for instance, features the trumpet trailblazer in two stellar performances -- at the helm of a small group with tenorman Sonny Stitt in 1958 in Belgium, and as the guest leader of the legendary Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Orchestra in Denmark in 1970. It's fascinating to observe his incomparable playing in two such different settings 12 years apart.
The series also features a pair of exceptional concerts from Fitzgerald, including her earliest known complete show on film (from Belgium in 1957) and an intimate TV studio appearance from Sweden taped with the brilliant pianist Tommy Flanagan in 1963.
Monk's performances, filmed three days apart in 1966, show the pianist at his quirky best, decked out in a narrow-brimmed fedora and displaying a gaudy pinky ring as his knobby hands bang out angular chords on the keyboard and he exhorts his sidemen to keep pace with his other-worldly ideas.
For those familiar only with his pop productions and movie scores, perhaps the most surprising DVD features Quincy Jones at the head of a hard-swinging 18-piece "dream band" (his words) that includes such jazz stalwarts as Phil Woods, Clark Terry, Jimmy Cleveland and Sahib Shihab.
Exhibiting what passes for "hep" in 1960, the orchestra is smartly turned out in designer turtlenecks and blazers.
Chet Baker's DVD also offers a few surprises, including the kind of wonderfully lyrical trumpet playing and agonizingly tender singing the troubled jazzman provided too rarely during a career marred by drug and alcohol use.
Galloway says every concert in the Jazz Icons series was transferred and remastered from original tapes.
Certainly the sound and video is first rate throughout.
But perhaps the biggest bonus was inadvertently created by the era's straight-forward film style, which places the music front and centre without the distractions of fancy technique.
Each DVD also comes with a booklet containing rare photos and an essay from a respected jazz writer, including Ira Gitler, Michael Cuscuna and Canadian Rob Bowman.
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