Jazz musician, born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, USA. He was raised in New York and received piano lessons at age 11. Two years later he accompanied his mother's singing at a local Baptist church and began playing piano at parties in Harlem. He led a trio at a neighbourhood bar c.1934, then spent two years touring with an evangelist. He attended Juilliard briefly in the late 1930s, and during 193944 worked as a sideman with Keg Purnell, Kenny Clarke, Lucky Millinder, and Kermit Scott.
As one of the key innovators of modern jazz, he also appeared regularly in the early 1940s at Minton's Playhouse, Clark Monroe's, and other Harlem after-hours clubs and rehearsal sessions where the rudiments of the new style were being developed. He made his recording debut with Coleman Hawkins (1944), appearing with the saxophonist's quintet for two years, then played with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra (1946). He began leading his own group (1947) in New York, and for the next seven years he recorded for Blue Note and Prestige and was at the height of his creativity as a composer, but he remained an enigmatic, underground figure. In 1951 he was convicted for drug possession and deprived of his cabaret card, which precluded him from working in New York nightclubs for six years. He performed occasionally during this period, including an appearance at the Paris Jazz Fair in 1954, and continued to record as a leader and sideman. In 1957 he returned to New York club work with a celebrated engagement at the Five Spot Cafe featuring his new quartet with John Coltrane, and he appeared on CBS-TV's The Sound of Jazz that year.
By 1961, when he formed a permanent quartet and began recording for Columbia Records, many of his compositions had become standards, among them Round Midnight, Straight No Chaser, Blue Monk, and Ruby My Dear. He toured the US continually throughout the 1960s, with also tours of Europe (1961) and Japan (1964). In 1964 he was featured in a Time magazine cover story, one of only five jazz musicians to have received such distinction. He accepted fewer engagements in the late 1960s, but toured internationally with the Giants of Jazz in 19712. He made his last major public appearance at the 1974 Newport Jazz Festival, and thereafter a combination of illness and voluntary inactivity kept him from performing. In 2006 he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Special Citation for a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz.
He is known for his unique improvisational style and many contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including his classic works "'Round Midnight" and "Blue Monk". Monk is often regarded as a founder of bebop although his playing style evolved away from the form.
Life and career
Early life
Little is known about Monk's early life. He was born on October 10, 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the son of Thelonious and Barbara Monk, with a sister named Marian who was two years older. Monk started playing the piano at the age of six;
In 1922 the family moved to Manhattan living at 243 West 63rd St., and Monk attended Stuyvesant High School, but did not graduate. Monk's stated influences include Duke Ellington, James P.
Monk's unique piano style was largely perfected during his stint as the house pianist at Minton's in the early-to-mid 1940s, when he participated in the famous after-hours "cutting competitions" that featured most of the leading jazz soloists of the day. The Minton's scene was crucial in the formulation of the bebop genre and it brought Monk into close contact and collaboration with other leading exponents of bebop including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson and John Coltrane.
1944-1954
In 1944 Monk made his first studio recordings with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet. Hawkins was among the first prominent jazz musicians to promote Monk, and Monk later returned the favor by inviting Hawkins to join him on the 1957 session with John Coltrane. Monk made his first recordings as leader for Blue Note in 1947 (later anthologised on Genius of Modern Music, Vol. Monk married Nellie Smith the same year, and in 1949 the couple had a son, T.S. Monk, who later became a jazz drummer.
In August 1951, New York City police searched a parked car occupied by Monk and friend Bud Powell. Monk refused to testify against his friend, so the police confiscated his New York City Cabaret Card. Monk spent most of the early and mid-1950s composing, recording, and performing at theaters and out-of-town gigs. In 1954, Monk participated on the famed Christmas Eve sessions which produced the albums, Bags' Groove and Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants by Miles Davis. Davis found Monk's idiosyncratic accompaniment style difficult to improvise over and asked him to lay out (not accompany), which almost brought them to blows.
Riverside and Columbia, 1954-1970
At the time of his signing to Riverside Monk was highly rated by his peers and by some critics, but his records did not sell in significant numbers, and his music was still regarded as too "difficult" for mass-market acceptance. His breakthrough came thanks to a compromise between Monk and the label, who convinced him to record two albums of his interpretations of jazz standards.
His debut for Riverside was a 'themed' record featuring Monk's distinctive interpretations of the music of Duke Ellington. The resulting LP, Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington, was designed to bring Monk to a wider audience, and pave the way for a broader acceptance of his unique style. According to recording producer Orrin Keepnews, Monk appeared unfamiliar with the Ellington tunes and spent a long time reading the sheet music and picking the melodies out on the piano keys. Given Monk's long history of playing, it seems unlikely that he didn't know Ellington's music, and it has been surmised that Monk's seeming ignorance of the material was a manifestation of his typically perverse humor, combined with an unstated reluctance to prove his own musical competency by playing other composers' works (even at this late date, there were still critics who carped that Monk "couldn't play"). The album is generally regarded as one of the less successful Monk studio outings but one that encouraged more consumer interest to the point where Riverside felt ready to try out an album featuring Monk's own compositions.
Finally, on the 1956 LP Brilliant Corners, Monk was able to record his own music. The album however, was largely regarded as the first success for Monk, which, according to Orrin Keepnews, "It was the first that made a real splash."
After having his cabaret card restored, Monk relaunched his New York career with a landmark six-month residency at the Five Spot Cafe in New York beginning in June 1957, leading a quartet that included John Coltrane on tenor saxophone. In 1958 Johnny Griffin took Coltrane's place as tenor player in Monk's band.
In 1958, Monk and de Koenigswarter were detained by police in Wilmington, Delaware. Though the police were authorized to search the vehicle and found narcotics in suitcases held in the trunk of the Baroness's car, Judge Christie of the Delaware Superior Court ruled that the unlawful detention of the pair, and the beating of Monk, rendered the consent to the search void as given under duress. Monk also had a regular working group, featuring the tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, but by now his compositional output had largely dried up.
Later life
Monk's manner was idiosyncratic. Bassist Al McKibbon, who had known Monk for twenty years and played on his final tour in 1971, later said "On that tour Monk said about two words.
Although these anecdotes may typify Monk's behavior in his later life, in Lewis Porter's biography of John Coltrane, the saxophonist reveals a very different side of Monk; Coltrane states that Monk was, in his opinion:
"...
There has been speculation that some of Monk's quirky behaviour was due to mental illness. In the documentary film Straight, No Chaser (produced in 1989 by Clint Eastwood on the subject of Monk's life and music), Monk's son, T.S. Monk, reported that Monk was on several occasions hospitalized due to an unspecified mental illness that worsened in the late 1960s. Monk's music is arguably the most recorded of any jazz composer.
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