Thelonious Sphere Monk ( October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". As of 2009, Monk was the second-most-recorded jazz composer in history, after Duke Ellington.Giddins, Gary; DeVeaux, Scott (2009). Jazz. New York: W.W. Norton;
Monk's compositions and improvisations feature dissonances and angular melodies, often using flat ninths, flat fifths, unexpected chromatic notes, low bass notes and stride, and fast whole tone runs. His playing style combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations.
His distinctive look included suits, hats, and sunglasses. He also had an idiosyncratic habit during performances; while other musicians continued playing, Monk would stop, stand up, and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano.
Monk is one of five jazz musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time magazine, along with Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and Wynton Marsalis.
Biography
1917–1933: Early life Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917Kelley, Robin (2010). Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. London: JR Books. p. 1. The source identifies the date of Monk's fortieth birthday in 1957. in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the son of Thelonious (or Thelious) and Barbara Monk. His sister, Marion, had been born two years earlier. His birth certificate spelled his first name as "Thelious" and did not list his middle name, taken from his maternal grandfather, Sphere Batts. His brother, Thomas, was born in January 1920. In 1922, the Monk family moved to the Phipps Houses at 243 West 63rd Street in San Juan Hill, Manhattan, New York City. (Subsequent redevelopment displaced the residents of the community, who saw their neighborhood replaced by the Amsterdam Housing Projects and Lincoln Center, though the Phipps Houses remained.) Monk briefly studied the trumpet before switching to piano at the age of nine. He took lessons from a neighbor, Alberta Simmons, who taught him the stride style of Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Eubie Blake. His mother also taught him to play some hymns, and he would often accompany her singing at church. He attended Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious public school for gifted students in Manhattan, but did not graduate.
For two years, Monk studied classical piano under Simon Wolf, an Austrian-born pianist and violinist who had studied under Alfred Megerlin, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Monk learned to play pieces by composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt, but his favorites were Chopin and Rachmaninoff. The lessons ended when it became clear that Monk's primary passion was jazz.Kelley, Robin (2009), p. 26.
1933–1946: Early performing career Monk put his first band together at the age of 16, getting a few restaurant and school gigs.Kelley, Robin (2009), p. 35. At 17, Monk toured as an organist with an evangelist, and in his late teens he began to find work playing jazz. In the early to mid-1940s, he was the house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. Much of Monk's style was developed while he performed at Minton's, where he participated in after-hours cutting contests which featured many leading jazz soloists of the time. Monk's musical work at Minton's was crucial in the formulation of bebop, which would be furthered by musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. Monk is believed to be the pianist featured on recordings Jerry Newman made around 1941 at the club. Monk's style at this time was later described as "hard-swinging", with the addition of runs in the style of Art Tatum. Monk's stated influences included Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and other early stride pianists. According to the documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser, Monk lived in the same neighborhood in New York City as Johnson and knew him as a teenager.
In March 1943, Monk reported for his Army Induction physical, but was labeled by the Army psychiatrist as a "psychiatric reject" and did not serve.Thelonious Monk The Life and Times of an American Original p.244
Mary Lou Williams, who mentored Monk and his contemporaries, spoke of him in this period: "So, the boppers worked out a music that was hard to steal. I'll say this for the 'leeches,' though: they tried. I've seen them in Minton's busily writing on their shirt cuffs or scribbling on the tablecloth. And even our own guys, I'm afraid, did not give Monk the credit he had coming. Why, they even stole his idea of the beret and bop glasses."
In 1944, Monk cut his first commercial recordings with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet. Hawkins was one of the earliest established jazz musicians to promote Monk, and the pianist later returned the favor by inviting Hawkins to join him on a 1957 session with John Coltrane.
1947–1952: Lorraine Gordon
In 1947, Ike Quebec introduced Monk to Lorraine Gordon and her first husband Alfred Lion, co-founder of Blue Note Records. Gordon preached Monk's genius to the jazz world with unrelenting passion. Shortly after meeting Gordon and Lion, Monk made his first recordings as a leader for Blue Note (later anthologized on Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1). The Monk Blue Note Sessions were recorded between 1947 and 1952.
Monk married Nellie Smith in 1947, and on December 27, 1949, the couple had a son, T. S. Monk (called Toot), who became a jazz drummer. A daughter, Barbara (affectionately known as Boo-Boo), was born on September 5, 1953, and died of cancer in 1984.
In her autobiography, Gordon wrote of the lack of interest in Monk's early recordings. "I went to Harlem and those record stores didn't want Monk or me. I'll never forget one particular owner, I can still see him and his store on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. 'He can't play lady, what are you doing up here? The guy has two left hands.' 'You just wait,' I'd say. 'This man's a genius, you don't know anything.
For Lion, sales were a secondary consideration. Producer Michael Cuscuna relates that Lion once told him that there were three people in his life that when he heard them he felt had to record everything they did: Monk, Herbie Nichols, and Andrew Hill.
Due to Monk's reticence, Gordon became his mouthpiece to the public. In February 1948, she wrote to Ralph Ingersoll, the editor of the newspaper PM, and described Monk as "a genius living here in the heart of New York, whom nobody knows". As a result, one of PM's best writers visited Monk to do a feature on him, but Monk wouldn't speak to the reporter unless Gordon was in the room with him. In September of the same year, Lorraine approached Max Gordon, the owner and founder of the Village Vanguard club in Greenwich Village, and secured Monk his first gig there. Monk was showcased at the club for a week, but not a single person came.
In August 1951, New York City police searched a parked car occupied by Monk and his friend Bud Powell. They found narcotics in the car, presumed to have belonged to Powell. Monk refused to testify against his friend, and so the police confiscated his New York City Cabaret Card. Without this, Monk was nominally unable to play in any New York venue where liquor was served. Although this severely restricted his ability to perform for several years, a coterie of musicians led by Randy Weston introduced Monk to Black-owned bars and clubs in Brooklyn that flouted the law, enabling the pianist to play little-advertised, one-night engagements throughout the borough. Monk spent most of the 1950s composing and performing at theaters, outer borough clubs and out-of-town venues.
1952–1954: Prestige Records After intermittent recording sessions for Blue Note from 1947 to 1952, Monk was under contract to Prestige Records for the following two years. With Prestige, he cut several highly significant, but at the time under-recognized, albums, including collaborations with the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach. In 1954, Monk participated in a Christmas Eve session, which produced most of the albums Bags' Groove and Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants by Davis. In his autobiography, Miles, Davis claimed that the alleged anger and tension between them did not take place and that the claims of blows being exchanged were "rumors" and a "misunderstanding".Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, 1989, p. 80.
In 1954, Monk paid his first visit to Paris. As well as performing at concerts, he recorded a solo piano session for French radio (later issued as an album by Disques Vogue). Backstage, Mary Lou Williams introduced him to Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a member of the Rothschild family and a patroness of several New York City jazz musicians. She was a close friend for the rest of Monk's life: she "served as a surrogate wife right alongside Monk's equally devoted actual wife, Nellie" and "paid Monk's bills, dragged him to an endless array of doctors, put him and his family up in her own home and, when necessary, helped Nellie institutionalize him."
1955–1961: Riverside Records
By the time of his signing to Riverside Records, Monk was highly regarded by his peers and by some critics, but his records remained poor sellers and his music was still regarded as too "difficult" for mainstream acceptance. Indeed, with Monk's consent, Riverside had managed to buy out his previous Prestige contract for a mere $108.24 ($1,273.44 in 2024). He willingly recorded two albums of jazz standards as a means of increasing his profile: Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington (1955) and The Unique Thelonious Monk (1956).
On Brilliant Corners, recorded in late 1956, Monk mainly performed his own music. The complex title track, which featured Rollins, was so difficult to play that the final version had to be edited together from multiple takes. The album was largely regarded as Monk's first commercial success.
After having his Cabaret Card restored, Monk relaunched his New York career with a landmark six-month residency at the Five Spot Café beginning in June 1957, leading a quartet with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. Little of this group's music was documented owing to contractual problems: Coltrane was signed to Prestige at the time, but Monk refused to return to his former label. One studio session by the quartet was made for Riverside, three tunes which were not released until 1961 by the subsidiary label Jazzland along with outtakes from a larger group recording with Coltrane and Hawkins, those results appearing in 1957 as the album Monk's Music. An amateur recording from the Five Spot (a later September 1958 reunion with Coltrane sitting in for Johnny Griffin) was issued on Blue Note in 1993; and a recording of the quartet performing at a Carnegie Hall concert on November 29 was recorded in high fidelity by Voice of America engineers, unearthed in the collection of the Library of Congress and released by Blue Note in 2005.
"Crepuscule with Nellie", recorded in 1957, was referred to by biographer Robin D. G. Kelley as Monk's "only through-composed composition, meaning that there is no improvising. It is Monk's concerto, if you will, and in some ways it speaks for itself. But he wrote it very, very carefully and very deliberately and really struggled to make it sound the way it sounds. ... it was his love song for Nellie"."Looking At The Life And Times Of Thelonious Monk", transcript of interview with Robin D. G. Kelley by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR; conducted in 2009, replayed December 17, 2010. Retrieved December 22, 2010.