Thelonious Monk

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 His cabaret card was revoked in 1951 after a drug arrest (he was protecting Bud Powell), and for six years he could not play in New York clubs.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. In February 1964, Monk was on the cover of Time magazine, only the fourth jazz musician so honored, after Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington.

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 of a stroke at Englewood Hospital in Englewood, New Jersey, on February 17, 1982, at the age of sixty-four.