The good news is that there will be a four-day festival in New York this month devoted to the music of Thelonious Monk. The less than entirely good news is that it’s being presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Lincoln Center’s jazz operation, under the unquestionably ambitious artistic direction of Wynton Marsalis, has been controversial from the beginning. As much praise as it has garnered for raising the music’s profile and treating it with the respect it deserves, it has attracted an equal amount of criticism for hewing to an overly conservative agenda. Still, while Jazz at Lincoln Center’s focus on the old at the expense of the new has been a legitimate source of carping, I have never heard anyone suggest that its devotion to major figures like Monk and Duke Ellington is a mistake. The issue is how that devotion is expressed.

Marsalis’s admiration for Monk is clearly genuine, and his young people’s lecture “Who Is Thelonious Monk?,” which he has delivered many times and will deliver again twice on Nov. 15 — technically part of the festival although the festival doesn’t officially begin until the 20th — is a decent introduction to the subject. But virtually every time he has presented a concert of Monk’s music it has been, at least to my ears, a disaster.

The worst example in my memory took place a decade or so ago — before Jazz at Lincoln Center was officially a separate entity within the Lincoln Center establishment with its own performance space — when Marsalis and the pianist Marcus Roberts attempted to re-create the remarkable music Monk had performed with a 10-piece ensemble at concerts in 1959 and 1963. Not only was the attempt a mess, full of wrong notes and missed cues and solos antithetical to Monk’s spirit; the name of Hall Overton, the man who actually wrote those historic arrangements (in collaboration with Monk), was never once mentioned from the stage, and appeared in the printed program only in tiny type — with his first name misspelled as “Hal.” As disgraceful as that omission was, perhaps it was just as well, considering how badly Overton’s work (as well as Monk’s) was butchered that night.

The centerpiece of this year’s Monk festival is a concert of Monk’s compositions arranged for big band and performed by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, with Roberts as the featured soloist, at the Rose Theater on Nov. 20, 21 and 22. As you may have guessed, I am not looking forward to it.

Previous attempts to translate Monk’s music to the big-band idiom — even by arrangers as gifted as Oliver Nelson and Bill Holman — have usually ended up seeming bloated and overly fussy. There’s not much reason to believe that the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which tends to sound bloated and overly fussy no matter whose music it plays, will be an exception.

The rest of the Monk Festival schedule holds more promise, especially the two-night run (Nov. 21 and 22) at the Allen Room, the smaller of J@LC’s two theaters, by Danilo Perez, the great Panamanian pianist who has a special affinity for Monk’s music. In addition, One for All, an all-star sextet featuring the saxophonist Eric Alexander, at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola (Nov. 21-23) — although the official festival announcement says that the group will be playing “the music of Monk and more,” and one wonders how much of their repertoire will be Monk and how much will be “more,” and how much “more” is appropriate for a Monk festival.

Thelonious Monk was a great composer — I’m hardly alone in considering him one of the greatest jazz has produced — and even a misguided and potentially botched celebration of his music is better than no celebration at all. But if I were you, I’d think twice about attending that big-band concert.

Further information about Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Monk Festival can be found at jalc.org.