Thelonious Monk

The pianist and composer of bebop and hard bop, born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, whose "'Round Midnight" is among the most recorded jazz compositions.

Minton's and Blue Note

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10, 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and grew up in San Juan Hill in Manhattan, where the family moved in 1922. His middle name came from his maternal grandfather, Sphere Batts. He took lessons from a neighbor, Alberta Simmons, in stride piano, and two years of classical piano with Simon Wolf, and attended Stuyvesant High School without graduating; the widespread claim that he attended Juilliard is disputed. He led a first band at 16 and toured at 17 as an organist with an evangelist. In the early to mid 1940s he was house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, helping to form bebop. His first commercial recordings, in 1944, were with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet.

In 1947 Ike Quebec introduced him to Alfred Lion and Lorraine Gordon of Blue Note, who recorded him from 1947 to 1952; the sessions were gathered as Genius of Modern Music (1951, recompiled on two 12-inch LPs in 1956). He then recorded for Prestige from 1952 to 1954, working with Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey and Max Roach, and the Christmas Eve 1954 session gave most of Bags' Groove. In 1954 he made his first trip to Paris and met Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a lifelong friend.

Riverside and Columbia

With producer Orrin Keepnews at Riverside from 1955 to 1961 he made The Unique Thelonious Monk (1956), Brilliant Corners (1957), Thelonious Himself (1957) and Monk's Music (1957). Brilliant Corners, recorded in 1956, took about 25 takes of the title track in a four-hour session and was edited from several; Down Beat called it the most critically acclaimed jazz album of 1957. In 1957 he led a quartet with John Coltrane, Wilbur Ware and Shadow Wilson at the Five Spot, a residency ending at Christmas, and a Carnegie Hall concert with Coltrane on November 29, 1957 was rediscovered in 2005 and released on September 27, 2005. A June 1958 Five Spot band had Johnny Griffin, later Charlie Rouse.

He signed with Columbia in 1962, producer Teo Macero, and Monk's Dream (1963) was his best-selling LP in his lifetime. His quartet then included Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales and Ben Riley. He appeared on the cover of Time on February 28, 1964. His last studio recordings as leader were in November 1971 for Black Lion, and he largely stopped performing by the mid-1970s. Thelonious Monk died on February 17, 1982, aged 64. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993 and a special Pulitzer citation in 2006; Robin Kelley's biography appeared in 2009, and the documentary Straight, No Chaser (1988), directed by Charlotte Zwerin, was added to the US National Film Registry in 2017.