Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Sphere Monk was present at the creation of bebop — at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem in the early 1940s, alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie — but his music was so individual that it couldn’t quite be contained by any movement, including the one he helped invent. His compositions don’t sound like bebop, or swing, or any other jazz style. They sound like Monk.

His piano technique was described as deliberately wrong: the flat fingers, the strange harmonic dissonances, the way he left space where other pianists filled it, the angular two-fisted chords that seemed to come from nowhere and resolve somewhere unexpected. But the wrongness was completely intentional and completely consistent. Monk knew exactly what he was doing; it just took audiences and critics about fifteen years to understand that.

His compositions — “‘Round Midnight,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Blue Monk,” “Rhythm-a-ning,” “Epistrophy,” “Well You Needn’t,” “Misterioso” — are among the most performed in jazz. Every jazz musician learns them. What is unusual is how many still sound like Monk even when other people play them: the angular melodies, the surprising harmonic turns, the spaces between the notes are all built into the structure. Monk’s music cannot be unfunked.

He spent years with a cabaret card revoked (a New York licensing mechanism used to deny musicians who had drug offenses the right to perform in clubs), working in near-obscurity before his 1957 residency at the Five Spot Café — with John Coltrane in his quartet — finally broke through to a wider audience.