Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Sphere Monk was once a guest at a Colombia University music class. The lecturer asked him to “play some of your weird chords for the class.”

“What do you mean, weird? They're perfectly logical”, Monk replied.

Monk’s quirky-yet-logical music was ignored for years, as it sounded discordant, and people “thought he lacked technique”. However, he was a very skilled pianist, and played like that on purpose.

Monk apparently developed his style in the early 40s, while he was resident pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. The club hosted a Monday night jam session, attended by many big names, like Dizzy Gillespie, who explained that he and Monk intentionally worked out a difficult way of playing:

“There were always some cats showing up there who couldn't blow at all and would take six or seven choruses to prove it. So on afternoons before a session, Thelonious Monk and I began to work out some complex variations on chords and the like, and we used them at night to scare away the no‑talent guys. After a while we got more and more interested in what we were doing as music, and, as we began to explore, our music evolved."

Drummer Kenny Clarke backed up this story, though pianist Mary-Lou Williams disagreed. She claimed that Monk was worried about having his ideas stolen by white people, saying: “We're going to create something they can't steal because they can't play it.”

Monk was born in North Carolina on October 10, 1917, but his family moved to New York when he was four. Not long after, he started playing piano, and taught himself to read music by sitting in on his sister’s piano lessons, looking over her shoulder. He had two years of classical training himself, and then started playing in bands aged 13.

The Apollo Theater in Harlem held an annual amateur music contest every week: the young Monk was eventually banned from taking part, as he won too often.

Monk showed signs of eccentricity ‘even early in his career’, arriving late for gigs, falling asleep at the piano, or retreating to his bedroom ‘for two weeks at a time’. A 1964 Time article on Monk, called him ‘The Lonliest Monk’, and said:

Every day is a brand-new pharmaceutical event for Monk: alcohol, Dexedrine, sleeping potions, whatever is at hand, charge through his bloodstream in baffling combinations. Predictably, Monk is highly unpredictable. When gay, he is gentle and blithe to such a degree that he takes to dancing on the sidewalks, buying extravagant gifts for anyone who comes to mind, playing his heart out. One day last fall he swept into his brother's apartment to dance before a full-length mirror... he left without a word...At such times, he seems a very happy man.

 At other times he appears merely mad. He has periods of acute disconnection in which he falls totally mute. He stays up for days on end, prowling around desperately in his rooms, troubling his friends, playing the piano as if jazz were a wearying curse. In Boston Monk once wandered around the airport until the police picked him up and took him to Grafton State Hospital for a week's observation. He was quickly released without strings, and though the experience persuaded him never to go out on the road alone again, he now tells it as a certification of his sanity. ‘I can't be crazy’, he says with conviction. ‘‘cause they had me in one of those places and they let me go.’

His father was not so lucky: Thelonious Monk Senior spent the last 22 years of his life in the North Carolina State Hospital for the Colored Insane.

Thelonious Junior suffered bipolar disorder, which was presumably the cause of much of his odd behaviour. However, as his most recent biographer notes: “He liked to entertain, to clown, to do the unusual, and he was often quite conscious and deliberate.” Monk’s bizarre dancing, presumably an example of clowning, was described in the 1964 Time article. During live shows, when other players were soloing, ‘he would rise from the piano to perform his Monkish dance’:

It is always the same. His feet stir in a soft shuffle, spinning him slowly in small circles. His head rolls back until hat brim meets collar, while with both hands he twists his goatee into a sharp black scabbard. His eyes are hooded with an abstract sleepiness, his lips are pursed in a meditative O. His cultists may crowd the room, but when he moves among them, no one risks speaking: he is absorbed in a fragile trance, and his three sidemen play on while he dances alone in the darkness. At the last cry of the saxophone, he dashes to the piano and his hands strike the keys in a cat's pounce.

In 1951, the year his first album came out, Monk was banned from performing in New York. He and pianist Bud Powell were arrested with a packet of heroin, which was clearly Powell’s, as Monk didn’t use drugs. However, Monk refused to incriminate his friend, and took full blame, serving 60 days in prison. His performer’s license (‘cabaret card’) was also taken away.

After six years, his influential friend Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter intervened on his behalf, and Monk finally got his card back. Police soon confiscated it again, after an arbitrary arrest. Time explained:

Monk, the Baroness, and Monk's present saxophonist were driving through Delaware for a week's work in Baltimore. Monk stopped at a motel for a drink of water, and when he lingered in his imposing manner, the manager called the police. Monk was back in the Bentley when the cops arrived, and he held fast to the steering wheel when they tried to pull him out - on the Monkish ground that he had done nothing to deserve their attention. Even though the Baroness shrieked to watch out for his hands, the furious cops gave his knuckles such a beating that he bears the lumps to this day.

The Baroness and Monk were lifelong friends, and for the last six years of his life he lived in her house, and she looked after him as his health deteriorated.

Monk played his last concert in 1976. That year, Colombia University’s student radio station ran a programme about him, during which the presenter said “Monk, playing the wrong notes on the piano, is able to create this kind of music...” Monk called the university switchboard, asking them to pass a message on to the host: “The piano ain't got no wrong notes.”

What to hear: Genius of Modern Music vol.1, Brilliant Corners, Alone in San Francisco and Straight, No Chaser

Why: He was way ahead of his time. Monk pioneered bebop but it took years for his genius to be recognised.