The remarkable Thelonious Monk entered modern jazz at an odd angle and left the same way. Or as Francis Bacon said in the age of Shakespeare: "There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion." 

Legend has it that Monk was the house piano player at Minton's in Harlem in the early 1940s, where the crucial after hours' collaboration of Bird and Diz sketched out  bebop. Monk's angular approach to harmony and rhythm, or just putting chords and lines together in unusual ways, was somehow worked into the design.

Monk's own version of the new music, however, never quite surfaced on the first wave of the original classic bebop in the late 1940s. His time did not come until the more accessible cool- jazz-hard-bop-and-other waves of the 1950s. Even then his music was unique. Any ordinary event in real life, Charlie Parker had said, could become music. Despite what probably was a quite artful technique, which is not easy to replicate, Monk was far from a virtuoso pianist. But he had a magical ability to turn the ordinary events of real life into compelling hip tunes. (If you unexpectedly hear Monk's "In Walked Bud" on your car radio, it has been said, you do suddenly seem to feel that you're in a bar somewhere and a guy called Bud has just walked in.)

Like Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Sphere Monk was born in 1917 in the Carolinas. But his family moved to New York City when he was still very young, and the adult Monk was an almost reclusive New York native son. He lived with his mother and then his wife Nellie, who seems to have managed the practical parts of his life (and to whom he paid an enduring tribute in the quite amazing tune "Crepuscule With Nellie"). Monk and Nellie had two children. In some ways he was the jazz musician as a family man who, when not actually working, stayed at home.

In some respects as well, Monk was just as privately troubled about the universe in which he found himself as Charlie Parker — but in a quieter more civilized way. In the 1950s he also developed a close friendship with the "Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, sister of Lord Rothschild," in whose Manhattan apartment Bird died in 1955. (Monk's musical understanding of this unusual rich and cultivated lady appears in his tune "Pannonica.")

Somewhat like Mingus, Monk became most famous for his compositions (though he remained just a songwriter: others have sometimes orchestrated his tunes). Many of his modern jazz classics were written in the 1940s, or in a few cases even a bit before — "Round Midnight," e.g., or "Epistrophy," or "Well You Needn't," or "In Walked Bud." And he sometimes played piano for both Bird and especially Dizzy Gillespie. But his almost primitive-art approach to the new music was at first underrated by both his peers and the wider jazz public. (And the New York City Police Department, who, after catching Monk as a found-in on a drug bust, barred him from working in local bars for several years — a problem that his friend the Baroness helped him ultimately sort out.)

In the last half of the 1950s Monk was "rediscovered" by his peers and almost suddenly embraced by a wider public, and then even the mainstream mass media in the USA. A very successful 1957 stint with John Coltrane at the Five Spot in New York was one landmark on his rise. Increasingly buoyant record sales and a more durable touring quartet with the tenor saxophone player Charlie Rouse took the remarkable Thelonious Monk into the 1960s.

Monk's uniquely exotic but also quite accessible incarnation of modern jazz struck some popular chord in the rising age of Aquarius. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1964, in the midst of the civil rights movement and the free speech campaign at Berkeley. With some unmistakable inner integrity (and no doubt his unusual given names), he seemed to stand for all the strange but interesting things avant-garde African American musicians were supposed to stand for, and his tunes were attractive even to people who did not ordinarily listen to jazz.

Somewhat like Paul Desmond, Monk appears to have started having second thoughts about his unexpectedly popular musical career in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s he had largely stopped performing in public and working on record dates. He (and pretty much Nellie as well?) moved into the Baroness's estate in New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson River. There Monk spent the last 10 years of his life in a highly reclusive style, apparently only rarely even touching the piano. The more than 70 songs he wrote and his ultimately vast legacy of recordings have nonetheless lived on famously after his death in 1982.

One of the key points of modern jazz, Charlie Parker had said, is that: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." Perhaps partly because he finally did not have a dazzling technique to fall back on, Thelonious Monk arguably lived up to this ideal even more than Bird himself. It is a remarkable great thing about modern jazz that he is one of its undoubted giants.

THE EARLIEST YEARS ON THE ROAD WITH A GOSPEL GROUP

All forms of music — and the other arts too — no doubt disproportionately attract emotionally awkward people. Music especially is a way of creating human universes that are somehow more perfect than the ones we usually confront on the ordinary planet earth.

As with Charlie Parker and a few other modern jazz giants, Thelonious Monk's life presents some puzzling psychological questions. Yet from another angle his story seems an almost conventional one of American family striving. He came from a family that left rural North Carolina for new opportunity in the biggest city of New York, and finally achieved more success than most who try such things, in the career of the modern jazz musician Thelonious Monk.

Monk's mother was apparently the driving force of the family ambition. (Though she almost seems to have trained his wife Nellie to succeed her. And then the Baroness came along from France to enrich the concept again. And Monk's father was important in the early picture for a time too, and had both the same first name and the same interest in the piano)...

Notes from Peter Keepnews, "Young Monk" (1989), in Rob van der Bliek (ed.), The Thelonious Monk Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)...

... "San Juan Hill, a primarily black area in Manhattan's West 60s where Monk spent most of his life" (MR, p. 6) [On San Juan Hill in 1905] ... "an apartment building on West 63^rd Street that was part of the Phipps Houses ... early example of subsidized housing built specifically for African Americans" (MR, p. 6) [On history of Phipps Houses] ...

Monk's father Thelonious Sr played piano (cf Charlie Parker Sr — and note all of Davis, Monk, and Parker had the same names as their fathers) ... "Another amenity that the Monks had in their new three-room apartment was a piano" ... Monk's father returns to North Carolina in the late 1920s, just before his son becomes a teenager ... "medical problems" ... for the same reasons Monk Sr had not moved to NY until about three years after the rest of his family (1922 ... 1925 ... he can't have been in NY long. He also played harmonica ... MR, pp. 6-7).

Monk had some instruction from a local piano teacher called Mr. Wolfe(e), when he was around 12 ... "During his brief tenure as a piano student (probably less than a year) he began to confront the fact that he would never be a virtuoso in the traditional sense" ... Nonetheless it seems it was Mr. Wolf who taught him the rudiments of musical theory and notation ...by the time he was 15 music had become the centre of Monk's life ... "His brother and sister recall him sitting at the piano for hours at a time, often painstakingly working out variations on a familiar old song" (MR, pp. 7-10)

In 1934, when he was 16, Monk's mother, Barbara, finally agreed that he could drop out of high school "and join some of his musician friends from the neighbourhood who were going on the road with a woman evangelist" .... "‘My mother,' Monk told the journalist Valerie Wilmer in 1965, ‘never figured I should do anything else. She was with me. If I wanted to play music, it was all right with her.'" (MR, p. 9).

... "playing in storefront churches and tent shows, over the course of what turned out to be a two-year road trip, presented new challenges that accelerated his development as a pianist ... Faced day after day with the simple harmonies of gospel music, Monk found a way to make those harmonies his own" ... "The protean pianist Mary Lou Williams, who was living in Kansas City in the mid 30s, saw Monk at several after-hours jam sessions during his extended stay there. ‘He was one of the original modernists all right,' she told Melody Maker in 1954, ‘playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he's playing now.'" (MR, p. 10).

[And this Mary Lou Williams story also raises the intriguing question of whether, during his extended stay in Kansas City, the young Monk somehow brushed up against the three-years-younger Charlie Parker, with or without either knowing who the other was or would be?]

"During his years with the evangelist or very soon after, Monk began writing music in earnest. He probably wrote his famous composition ‘Round Midnight' in those years. He definitely wrote such cornerstones of his repertoire as ‘Well You Needn't' and "Ruby My Dear." The inspiration for the latter piece, one of his most beautiful ballads, was his sister's best friend, a dietician named Ruby Richardson, whom he met shortly after he returned to New York and who soon became his first serious girlfriend." (MR, p. 10).

"Four years elapsed between the time Monk returned from the road and the start of the epochal Minton's engagement. During those years he paid his share of dues. His early professional experience in New York included, as he later told a friend, jobs backing up singers ‘who sing all kinds of songs and fuck up and blame it on the musicians," as well as at least one brief stint with a polka band." (MR, p. 11).

MONK IN THE 1940s AND EARLY 1950s — A KIND OF GEORGE ORWELL BEFORE ANIMAL FARM

MONK AS A GURU OF THE AGE OF AQUARIUS — FROM THE LATE 1950s TO THE EARLY 1970s

NICA'S DREAM — THE LAST 10 YEARS IN THE BARONESS'S MANSION, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HUDSON RIVER IN NEW JERSEY

Books and poetry sections from "Selected Monk Bibliography" at monkzone.com

"There are literally thousands of articles about Monk and his music, the vast majority of which are concert and record reviews. Below is a selection of books ... and poetry collections that focus directly on Monk. Although the items contain various errors and inaccuracies, we include them because they represent some of the more substantial writing on Monk's life and music."

It also seems apt that this monkzone bibliography includes a few "poetry collections." Monk himself was a kind of poet, who used the notes on the piano instead of words to communicate his poetic impulses. And what the Harvard literary critic Helen Vendler has recently said about poetry — that it shows how "the experiences of life can be reconstituted and made available as beauty and solace, to help us live our lives" — could easily and aptly be said about the music of Thelonious Monk as well.

[For the Helen Vendler quotation see Christopher Benfey, "The Art of Consolation," New York Review of Books, April 28, 2005: or the original source — the text of a recent lecture by Helen Vendler, published by The New Republic, July 19, 2004.]

Books

Black Music Research Journal 19, no. 2 (Fall 1999). [Special issue on Monk with articles by Robin D. G. Kelley, Ingrid Monson, Scott DeVeaux, Mark Tucker, Krin Gabbard, and Rob van der Bliek] 

Buin, Yves, Thelonious Monk (Paris: P.O.L., 1988).

de Wilde, Laurent. Monk. (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1997).

Fitterling, Thomas. Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books, 1997).

Gillespie, Dizzy, with Al Fraser. To Be or Not to Bop: Memoirs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).

Goldberg, Joe. Jazz Masters of the 50¹s (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 24_44.

Gourse, Leslie. Straight No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997)

Ponzio, Jacques and Francois Postif, Blue Monk: Un Portrait de Thelonious (Paris: Actes Sud, 1995).

Sheridan, Chris (comp.). Brilliant Corners: A Bio-Discography of Thelonious Monk (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001)

van der Bliek, Rob. ed., The Thelonious Monk Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Because several key interviews and essays can be found in van der Bliek¹s edited collection, they are not included in the list of articles below.Selected

Poems and Poetry Collections

Baraka, Amiri. Funk Lore (Los Angels: Littoral Books, 1996). Selections.

Coleman, Wanda. "On Theloniousism," Caliban 4 (1988), 67-79.

Etter, Dave. Well, You Needn¹t : The Thelonious Monk Poems (Independence, Mo. : Raindust Press, 1975)

Feinstein, Sascha. Epistrophies: poems celebrating Thelonius Monk and his music," African American Review 31, no. 1 (Spring 1997).

Lange, Art and Nathaniel Mackey, eds., Moment¹s Notice: Jazz in Prose and Poetry (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993). Selections.

Williams, Jonathan. TSM (1917_1982) (Rocky Mount, NC: Arthur Mann Kaye, 1982).