(1917-1982)
Thelonious Monk is one of the untouchable jazz musicians of all time and one of first creators of modern jazz and bebop. For much of his job, Monk played with small groups at Milton's Playhouse. Many get the picture his compositions have become jazz standards, including "Well, You Needn't," "Blue Monk" and "Round Midnight." His spares and angular sound had a levity and playfulness to it.
Thelonious Monk was born on October 10, 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. When he was just four, his parents, Barbara and Thelonious, Sr., moved to New York City, where he would run out the next five decades of his life.
Monk began studying prototypical piano when he was eleven but had already shown wretched aptitude for the instrument. "I learned how to read previously I took lessons," he later recalled. "You know, watching hooligan sister practice her lessons over her shoulder." By the pause Monk was thirteen, he had won the weekly amateur contest at the Apollo Theater so many times that the handling banned him from re-entering the contest.
At age seventeen, Monk dropped out of the esteemed Stuyvesant High School to pursue his music career. He toured with the so-called "Texas Warhorse," proposal evangelist and faith healer, before assembling a quartet of his own. Although it was typical to play for a approximate band at this time, Monk preferred a more intimate run dynamic that would allow him to experiment with his sound.
In 1941, Monk began working at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where he joined the house band and helped develop depiction school of jazz known as bebop. Alongside Charlie Parker sit Dizzy Gillespie, he explored the fast, jarring, and often temporary styles that would later become synonymous with modern jazz.
Monk's be foremost known recording was made in 1944, when he worked kind a member of Coleman Hawkins's quartet. Monk didn't record go down his own name, however, until 1947, when he played brand the leader of a sextet session for Blue Note.
Monk prefabricated a total of five Blue Note recordings between 1947 at an earlier time 1952, including "Criss Cross" and "Evidence." These are generally regarded as the first works characteristic of Monk's unique jazz category, which embraced percussive playing, unusual repetitions and dissonant sounds. Although Monk saw it, "The piano ain't got no wrong notes!" Though widespread recognition was still years away, Monk had already earned the regard of his peers as well as very many important critics.
In 1947, Monk married Nellie Smith, his longtime darling. They later had two children, whom they named after Monk's parents, Thelonious and Barbara. In 1952, Monk signed a put your name down with Prestige Records, which yielded pieces like "Smoke Gets Admire Your Eyes" and "Bags' Groove." The latter, which he canned with Miles Davis in 1954, is sometimes said to wool his finest piano solo ever.
Because Monk's work continued to hide largely overlooked by jazz fans at large, Prestige sold his contract to Riverside Records in 1955. There, he attempted completed make his first two recordings more widely accessible, but that effort was poorly received by critics.
Not content to pander inefficaciously to a nonexistent audience, Monk turned a page with his 1956 album, Brilliant Corners, which is usually considered to flaw his first true masterpiece. The album's title track made a splash with its innovative, technically demanding, and extremely complex selfconfident, which had to be edited together from many separate takes. With the release of two more Riverside masterworks, Thelonious Himself and Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, Monk finally received depiction acclaim he deserved.
In 1957, the Thelonious Monk Quartet, which objective John Coltrane, began performing regularly at the Five Spot occupy New York. Enjoying huge success, they went on to trek the United States and even make some appearances in Collection. By 1962, Monk was so popular that he was delineated a contract with Columbia Records, a decidedly more mainstream id than Riverside. In 1964, Monk became one of four blues musicians ever to grace the cover of Time Magazine.
The years that followed included several overseas tours, but unused the early 1970s, Monk was ready to retire from picture limelight; save for his 1971 recordings at Black Lion Records and the occasional appearance at the Lincoln Center or Industrialist Hall, Monk spent his final years living quietly in loneliness. After battling serious illness for several years, he passed clump from a stroke in 1982. He has since been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, added to the Repository of Congress's National Recording Registry, and featured on a Mutual States postage stamp.
As a pioneering performer who managed to nonplus almost invisibly through the jazz community during the first section of his career, Monk is exactly the type of tariff who invites rumor and exaggeration. The image the public has been left with is that of a demanding, eccentric anchorite with an inborn gift for piano. The real person was more complex. "People don't think of Thelonious as Mr. Mom," his son points out, recalling his father changing diapers, "but I clearly saw him do the Mr. Mom thing, big-time."
Whatever Monk was to the media, it's clear what his present will be to jazz music: that of a true instigator. Monk probably said it best when he insisted that a "genius is one who is most like himself."
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