If we were forced to boil Thelonious Monk's historic output to a dozen tracks, we'd be hard pressed to do better than this 1956 anthology of the envelope-pushing pianist's earliest Blue Note sides from 1947. It's incredible to realize that this many of Monk's most epochal tunes arrived so early on. From the immortal, moody nocturne "'Round Midnight" to the Cubist angularity of "Epistrophy," Monk's masterful use of ostensibly discordant harmonies in the service of constantly surprising, undeniably intoxicating melodies still seems miraculous today.