condition (record/cover): EX+ / VG+ (minimal edges and ring wear)

Postcard included.

Two of the most singular composers in the music, paired on one record, and one of them still almost unknown. Thelonious Monk needs no introduction; Herbie Nichols spent his life playing Dixieland gigs to pay rent, recorded a handful of trio sides that nobody bought, and died of leukaemia in 1963 at forty-four, leaving behind a body of compositions as strange, precise and personal as anything Monk wrote. Hearing them side by side makes the comparison unavoidable and entirely fair. Nichols is lighter in touch and more oblique harmonically. He deserved a career and did not get one.

Savoy pressing. Worth it for the Nichols alone.