Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk grew up in San Juan Hill, the Manhattan neighborhood the city later bulldozed for Lincoln Center, after his family moved there from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1922. He switched from trumpet to piano at nine and learned stride style from a neighbor, Alberta Simmons, before studying classical piano for two years under an Austrian-born teacher who had him working through Bach and Chopin. He toured briefly as a teenager playing organ behind a traveling evangelist, then came home to Harlem and, through the early 1940s, became house pianist at Minton's Playhouse, where the after-hours jam sessions among Monk and a handful of other young players quietly built the vocabulary that became bebop.

Monk recorded as a leader for Blue Note from 1947 to 1952, but a 1951 drug arrest in a car he shared with Bud Powell cost him his New York City cabaret card when he refused to inform on his friend, which meant he could not legally play in any club that served liquor in his own hometown for most of the decade. He kept working anyway, moved to Riverside in 1954, and broke through commercially with Brilliant Corners in 1956 and a six-month Five Spot Café residency with John Coltrane in 1957. Columbia signed him in 1962; Monk's Dream became his best-selling album, and in February 1964 he appeared on the cover of Time. He is now counted the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, and "'Round Midnight" the most recorded jazz standard written by one person.

By the late 1960s the eccentricities that had always surrounded Monk, the sudden silences, the habit of standing up mid-song to dance a few turning steps, hardened into something his family could no longer explain as personality. He would sometimes fail to recognize his own son. Doctors recommended electroconvulsive therapy; his family refused it and put him on antipsychotics and lithium instead, though at least one psychiatrist later found no clear evidence of the bipolar disorder or schizophrenia he had been treated for, and another argued the drugs themselves had done damage. He largely stopped performing by the mid-1970s and spent his last six years in the New Jersey home of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, cared for there alongside his wife, Nellie, with a piano in the room he mostly would not touch.

Monk died of a stroke on February 17, 1982, having spent his last years almost entirely out of public view. Recognition arrived in installments after that: a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, and in 2006 a special Pulitzer Prize citation for a body of work the prize committee had never managed to honor while he was alive to receive it. His family and the pianist Herbie Hancock's foundation later grew out of an institute originally founded in his name in 1986, and Monk's composing helped anchor the case for what became, in 2012, the first annual UNESCO International Jazz Day.

Thelonious Monk's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1 (Blue Note) album
  First recordings as a leader, 1947-1952 1947
• Brilliant Corners album
  Riverside Records; widely regarded as his commercial breakthrough 1956
• "'Round Midnight" song
  His best-known composition and the most recorded jazz standard by one writer 1944
• Monk's Dream album
  First Columbia release; the best-selling album of his career 1963
• Five Spot Café residency with John Coltrane other
  Six-month run, June-December 1957 1957

• October 10, 1917 aged 0 Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina
• 1922 aged ~5 Family relocates to San Juan Hill, Manhattan
• March 1943 aged 25 Rejected for Army service as a psychiatric reject
• 1947 aged ~30 Signs with Blue Note Records
• August 1951 aged 33 Loses his New York City cabaret card after a narcotics arrest with Bud Powell Refused to testify against Powell; barred for years from playing venues that served liquor.
• June 1957 aged 39 Begins a six-month Five Spot Café residency with John Coltrane
• October 15, 1958 aged 41 Beaten by Delaware police during a roadside stop A judge later ruled the search that followed was unlawful.
• February 28, 1964 aged 46 Appears on the cover of Time magazine The story was titled "The Loneliest Monk."
• February 17, 1982 aged 64 Dies of a stroke in Englewood, New Jersey

• John Coltrane 1926–1967
  Saxophonist and composer whose technical and spiritual explorations transformed modern jazz. collaborated with
• Miles Davis 1926–1991
  Trumpeter and bandleader who repeatedly redirected jazz through bebop, cool jazz, modal music, and fusion. contemporary of
• Duke Ellington 1899–1974
  Composer and bandleader who expanded the artistic ambition and vocabulary of jazz. second-most-recorded jazz composer after
• Charlie Parker 1920–1955
  Saxophonist whose virtuosity and harmonic innovations made him a principal creator of bebop and modern jazz. contemporary architect of bebop