“I've had music in my mind ever since 1920,” muses the recorded voice of Thelonious Monk halfway through this artful and long-overdue tribute to jazz’s most original major pianist-composer. A quarter-century after his death in 1982, musicians are still learning from Monk’s work. Each angular masterpiece has a unique logic that never shone more brightly than when orchestrated by Hal Overton for the 1959 New York concert, Monk at Town Hall.

It’s a classic Riverside recording, treasured by every jazz lover, but Jason Moran is a bit of an audiovisual radical himself and does much more than blow the dust off Monk’s Mood, Friday the Thirteenth, Little Rootie Tootie and other venerable charts. His erudite piano introduction to Crepuscule with Nellie, for instance, reveals deep immersion in the Monk mystique. Unlike a mere copyist, he takes the original harmonies to credible new places before returning them to familiar resolutions. And his big-screen visuals make strong points of their own.

“This is the South Carolina plantation,” a commentator remarks over a rural locale, “of Archibald Monk, who owned Thelonious Monk’s grandparents.” Equally startling are taped discussions where Monk warns Overton against over-harmonisation — “It makes the music stiff” — and argues for deeper rehearsal — “maybe just one number a day. I don’t want no sight-reading contests”.

Perhaps with these strictures in mind, Moran distributed headphones to his Anglo-American octet at one point, with instructions to don them and follow the original recording as they played. Unfazed, trumpeter Byron Wallen, trombonist Fayyas Virgi, tubaist Andy Grappy and saxmen Denys Baptiste and Jason Yarde all took worthy solos before US bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits led them into a marching-band stroll around the hall for a memorable finale.

Bath Festival, Sat (01225 463362).