Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. In 1922, his family moved to the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, settling at 243 West 63rd Street. He switched from trumpet to piano at the age of nine, taking lessons from a neighbor named Alberta Simmons, who taught him the stride style associated with Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Eubie Blake. For two years he also studied classical piano under Simon Wolf, an Austrian-born pianist and violinist, learning pieces by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt, though his particular favorites were Chopin and Rachmaninoff.

Monk attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan but did not graduate. He put his first band together at sixteen and at seventeen toured as an organist with an evangelist. By the early to mid-1940s he had become the house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where after-hours jam sessions drew leading soloists and became a crucible for bebop. Among the musicians who participated in that ferment were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke, and Miles Davis. Monk's stated influences included Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson, and he knew Johnson personally as a teenager, having grown up in the same neighborhood.

In 1944, Monk made his first commercial recordings with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet, one of the earliest established jazz musicians to champion him. In 1947, saxophonist Ike Quebec introduced Monk to Lorraine Gordon and her then-husband Alfred Lion, co-founder of Blue Note Records. Monk recorded his first sessions as a leader for Blue Note shortly afterward, music later collected on Genius of Modern Music. Gordon became a fierce public advocate for Monk at a time when record store owners dismissed him as a pianist with, in one owner's words, two left hands.

In August 1951, New York City police searched a parked car occupied by Monk and Bud Powell and found narcotics presumed to belong to Powell. Monk refused to testify against his friend, and the police confiscated his New York City Cabaret Card, which nominally barred him from performing at any licensed venue in the city. A group of musicians led by Randy Weston found him work at Black-owned clubs in Brooklyn that ignored the restriction, allowing Monk to continue playing in low-profile engagements throughout the borough. From 1952 to 1954, Monk recorded for Prestige Records, cutting sessions with Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, and Max Roach, and in 1954 made his first visit to Paris, where he recorded a solo piano session for French radio. Backstage in Paris, Mary Lou Williams introduced him to Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a member of the Rothschild family and a devoted patron of New York jazz musicians, who became one of the closest figures in his life.

After signing with Riverside Records, Monk recorded two albums of jazz standards to widen his audience, then in late 1956 released Brilliant Corners, dominated by his own compositions. The complex title track was so difficult that the final version had to be assembled from multiple takes, yet the album became his first broadly recognized commercial success. With his Cabaret Card restored, Monk launched a landmark six-month residency at the Five Spot Cafe in June 1957, leading a quartet that included John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums.

Monk's compositions and playing were built on dissonances, angular melodies, flat ninths, flat fifths, unexpected chromatic notes, and sudden silences. He attacked the keyboard with fingers held flat rather than curved, often striking a single key with more than one finger and dividing melodic lines between both hands. In contrast to most bebop pianists, he frequently used a left-hand stride pattern both as a soloist and as an accompanist. A further signature habit was stopping entirely while a soloist played, leaving them supported only by the bass and drums. He also had a proclivity for the key of B-flat: all of his blues compositions, including Blue Monk and Misterioso, were written in that key.

Monk signed with Columbia Records in 1962 after his relationship with Riverside soured over royalty disputes. Working with producer Teo Macero, his debut Columbia album Monk's Dream was released in 1963 with a lineup that had been with him for two years: tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist John Ore, and drummer Frankie Dunlop. Columbia's promotional resources gave Monk a visibility he had never previously enjoyed, and Monk's Dream became the best-selling album of his lifetime.

On February 28, 1964, Monk appeared on the cover of Time magazine, one of only five jazz musicians to receive that distinction, alongside Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and Wynton Marsalis. The cover article had originally been scheduled for November 1963 but was delayed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Monk continued to record for Columbia through the decade, with later albums including Criss Cross and Underground, the latter containing his only composition in three-four time, Ugly Beauty. His longest-serving band during the Columbia years consisted of Rouse, bassist Larry Gales, and drummer Ben Riley, all three of whom stayed with him for over four years.

By the mid-1970s, Monk had largely withdrawn from performing for health reasons. His last studio recordings as a leader were made in November 1971 for the English Black Lion label, near the end of a worldwide tour with the Giants of Jazz, a group that also included Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon, and Art Blakey. His final six years were spent as a guest in the Weehawken, New Jersey, home of Baroness de Koenigswarter, who cared for him through his final illness. He did not play the piano during this period, even though one was available in his room, and he spoke to almost no one.

Monk died of a stroke on February 17, 1982, at Englewood Hospital in Englewood, New Jersey. His funeral was held at St. Peter's Church in Manhattan, and he was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. In 1993, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2006 he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for a body of musical composition that had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz. As of 2009, he was the second-most-recorded jazz composer in history, behind only Duke Ellington, and his composition Round Midnight is widely recognized as the most recorded jazz standard written by a single artist.