Thelonious Monk was one of the most original and idiosyncratic figures in jazz history. Almost from the start of his long career, the pianist and composer pursued a singular but relentlessly focused path through jazz, playing his own music in his own instantly identifiable way, with a seeming disregard for popular acceptance that was extreme even by jazz standards. Thelonious Sphere Monk Jr. was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina on 10 October 1917, but lived in New York from the age of six. The Harlem stride pianists of the 1920s became a sublimated but palpable influence on his rhythmic style.
His idiosyncratic approach extended to every element of his music. His angular melodies, unconventional dissonant harmonies and oblique rhythmic patterns all bore his stamp, as did his touch at the keyboard (not to mention his penchant for using his elbow and forearm to crash out huge clusters of notes, or breaking into a little dance around the instrument).
A Unique Artistic Vision Monk recycled his compositions endlessly in concert and on records, often in rather rigidly demarcated fashion. He was an introverted, eccentric figure in the colourful world of jazz, but he had a unique artistic vision and a single-minded determination to realize that vision. He was at the centre of the group of musicians who forged the framework for bebop at Minton's Playhouse in the mid-19405, but even there his highly individual style placed him a little to the side of the central flow of the music (Bud Powell, a friend of Monk's, provided the more canonical example of the bebop pianist).
He worked with Coleman Hawkins, Lucky Millinder, Cootie Williams and Dizzy Gillespie in the mid-1940s, and began recording as a leader for Blue Note Records in 1947. His recordings for that label (until 1952), Prestige (1952-54) and
Riverside (1954-60) comprise the bulk of his cl music. He signed to Columbia in 1960 and recc in solo and big-band settings with the label - as as in the familiar quartet format - but added on new compositions in that time, preferring to rei his classic canon of the 1950s until his departui the label, and start of total withdrawal, in 1969