Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. A leading figure in Jazz's bebop movement, alongside contemporaries such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus. His playing was described as percussive and minimal, often being described as sharp or angular. He was known for using complex and dissonant harmonies and unusual intervals and rhythms. As Monk’s music was also known for its jocular, almost humourous, quality.
He was also one of the most brilliant composers in the history of jazz. Many of his compositions, which were generally written in the 12-Bar Blues form, became jazz standards. Among his best-known works are "Well, You Needn’t", "I Mean You", "In Walked Bud", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "Mysterioso", "Epistrophy", "Blue Monk", and "'Round Midnight", He influenced the flavour of much modern jazz, influencing pianists such as Cecil Taylor, Bill Evans and Chick Corea.
His son, T. S. Monk (born 1949), is a jazz drummer and composer.
Albums by Thelonius Monk with their own page:
Tropes, 'Round Midnight
- The Ace: He is generally considered to be one of, if not, the greatest jazz composers. He only wrote about 70 tunes (whereas Duke Ellington wrote or co-wrote thousands), but almost all of them have become jazz standards. This is highly unusual.
- Book Dumb: Averted. He was long-rumoured to be the jazz equivalent of this: someone who wrote his idiosyncratic tunes and played them the way he did because he was simply unfamiliar with the bulk of Western music and was expressing his "natural self", or whatever. But one of his biographers noted that in fact he was well-versed in classical music and could play difficult Chopin pieces with ease. He wrote the way he did because he wanted to, and he had to learn to play his own work just as everyone else did.
- Eccentric Artist: He was well known for his odd onstage antics such as randomly stopping, standing up and dancing while the musicians were still performing.
- Iconic Outfit: Crisp knife-sharp suits, pork-pie hats and Sunglasses at Night.
- Improv: As with many other musicians from his time, he was fond of experimenting live on stage.
- Non-Indicative Name: The song identified as "Japanese Folk Song" on Straight, No Chaser (1967) is in fact not a folk song, although it is at least Japanese: it is "Kōjō no Tsuki" ("荒城の月", literally "The Moon over the Castle in Ruins") from the Meiji period. Monk was not aware of this at the time, nor did he know its provenance; reissues changed its title to "Japanese Folk Song (Kōjō no Tsuki)", acknowledged its composer Rentarō Taki (滝廉太郎, 1879-1903), and (on CD) restored what was an edited 11:03 performance on LP to its unexpurgated 16:42 running time. (It's still not a folk song, but people who'd owned it would probably wonder what had happened to the "Japanese Folk Song" if the reissue hadn't kept the title somewhere.)
- No Social Skills: He tended to come across as this to people he didn't like, or was uncomfortable around. To people he liked and trusted he was charming, and he could conduct long conversations about music and other topics, but when he wasn't at ease he tended to lapse into long silences, which almost nobody could break him out of. It's been speculated that he might have had bipolar disorder.
