Thelonious Monk is widely accepted as a genuine master of American music. His compositions constitute the core of jazz repertory and are performed by artists from many different genres. He is the subject of award winning documentaries, biographies and scholarly studies, prime time television tributes, and he even has an Institute created in his name. The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz was created to promote jazz education and to train and encourage new generations of musicians. It is a fitting tribute to an artist who was always willing to share his musical knowledge with others but expected originality in return.
Monk played with Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins, and his compositions are the master works of jazz. From bebop to his own rhythmic, angular style of the late 50s and early 60s, he was a force of sophisticated sounds, movements, and melodies unmatched in the jazz world. Monk absorbed the sounds of the street and that street was jazz mixed with gospel. These sounds along with Tatum’s percussive style are immersed in Monk’s sound. Monk was a mostly self-taught pianist but he did end up studying music theory at Julliard.
Monk is the second most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington and he is one of five jazz musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time (the other four being Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Wynton Marsalis, and Dave Brubeck)
Here is the Clint Eastwood documentary, Straight, No Chaser on the life and times of Monk.
This exemplary documentary about seminal jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk reaps the benefits of multiple blessings, including the skilled editorial hand of director Charlotte Zwerin and the patronage of executive producer (and erstwhile jazz pianist) Clint Eastwood. Most vital is the use of extensive 1968 footage, shot by Michael and Christian Blackwood, documenting the sometimes moody, sometimes puckish Monk in the studio, on tour, and off stage, which on its own would make this essential jazz viewing.
Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser provides an intelligent portrait of this often reclusive, sometimes difficult artist, including telling glimpses of his volatility. A stormy studio session with Teo Macero, then Columbia Records’ preeminent jazz producer, speaks volumes about Monk’s very private approach to his muse. Perceptive interviews and glimpses of Monk’s sunnier moments provide added depth, yet the real triumph is the generous catalog of classic Monk songs captured on camera. —Sam Sutherland
The Life and Times of an American Original
Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of “bebop” and establishing Monk as one of America’s greatest com ¬posers. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz’s most original composer.
“Robin Kelley’s new biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is a breath of fresh air among the biographies of our legendary jazz musicians. This book is thorough, detailed, and written with a true affinity for Monk’s humaneness and creative musical output. It fills in the missing pieces about the growth of the jazz scene in New York through the forties, fifties, and sixties, detailing each step of Monk’s development — who passed through his bands, what gigs he played, and what happened on those scenes. It’s an invaluable and close look at the center of the world’s most important creative musical developments in those decades: New York City.” — Chick Corea