Thirty-four albums reviewed across two decades: from the angular Blue Note 78s that baffled everyone in the late 1940s, through the Riverside renaissance that finally brought recognition, the Columbia years when the quartet played the music into the ground night after night, and the final London sessions where Monk, Blakey, and McKibbon closed the book.
The foundational recordings: the 78-rpm sessions for Blue Note that invented a new piano vocabulary, the Prestige dates with Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey, and the trio sessions that proved Monk's music worked in any setting. The world was not yet listening.
Read reviews →The breakthrough. Orrin Keepnews gives Monk room to work, and the results include Brilliant Corners, the Five Spot recordings with Johnny Griffin, the Mulligan and Blakey summits, and the solo and touring records that brought him to the widest audience of his life.
Read reviews →The major-label era: Monk's Dream, the big band concerts at Philharmonic Hall, the working quartet with Charlie Rouse and Larry Gales and Ben Riley, Solo Monk, the Grammy-winning Underground, and the Oliver Nelson big band date that closed the Columbia contract.
Read reviews →The final studio sessions. Recorded in a single day at Chappell Studios in London at the end of the Giants of Jazz tour: three hours of solo piano followed by three hours of trio with Al McKibbon and Art Blakey. Monk's last word as a recording artist.
Read reviews →Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and grew up in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. His mother brought the family north when he was four, and by the time he was a teenager he was playing piano at his local Baptist church and winning amateur competitions at the Apollo Theater. In the early 1940s he became the house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where the after-hours jam sessions with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke, and others laid the groundwork for bebop. Monk's role in that revolution was foundational but underrecognized for years.
Blue Note signed him in 1947, and the recordings he made for the label between then and 1952 contained some of the most original compositions in jazz history: "'Round Midnight," "Straight, No Chaser," "Epistrophy," "Ruby, My Dear," "Well, You Needn't," "Misterioso." The public did not buy them. Critics found his playing eccentric, his compositions willfully strange, and his refusal to accommodate conventional taste baffling. His cabaret card was revoked in 1951 after a drug arrest (he was protecting Bud Powell), and for six years he could not play in New York clubs.
The Riverside years changed everything. Producer Orrin Keepnews eased Monk back into the public eye with a Duke Ellington standards album, then let him loose on Brilliant Corners and Monk's Music. When the cabaret card was restored in 1957, the quartet residency at the Five Spot Café with John Coltrane became one of the most important engagements in jazz history. By 1962, Monk was on the cover of Time magazine, only the third jazz musician so honored.
The Columbia years (1962-1968) brought wider distribution and bigger venues but a narrowing of the repertoire. The quartet with Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales, and Ben Riley played the same compositions with undiminished intensity, and the best of the Columbia records are as strong as anything Monk ever made. After the Columbia contract ended, Monk toured with the Giants of Jazz alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon, and Art Blakey, and recorded his final sessions for Black Lion in London in November 1971. He withdrew from public life almost entirely after that, spending his last years at the home of his patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter in Weehawken, New Jersey. He died there on February 17, 1982, at the age of sixty-four.