Okay, let's get into it. Today we are doing a
deep dive into the life, the music, and just
the sheer uncompromising vision of Thelonious
Fear Monk. When you hear that name, you probably
get this immediate mental image, right? The impeccable
suits, the crazy hats, the sunglasses. And the
dancing, that little shuffle he does while the
band plays on. Exactly, that image. But it's
so powerful, that persona, that it can sometimes
overshadow the absolute revolution he started
in music. It really can. And that's our mission
today, I think. To go beyond that icon, beyond
the persona, and really dig into the struggle,
the musical, the personal, the professional struggle
that defined his entire career. Absolutely. Because
the raw numbers, they really back up his importance.
I mean, he is the second most recorded jazz composer
in history. The second. Just think about that.
The only person ahead of him is Duke Ellington.
which is just staggering. Ellington basically
invented the big band playbook to be right behind
him. It tells you the scale of his contribution,
and it's not just the volume. You look at a song
like Round Midnight. The ultimate ballad. It
is the most recorded jazz standard written by
a single composer, period. It's just foundational.
And then you got the bangers, you know, Blue
Monk, Straight, No Chaser. Well, you needn't.
These are tunes that define the whole language
of bebop. They do. And that's the paradox of
his style, which we should probably touch on
right away. Yeah, let's set the stage. He was
rooted in this really old school. Harlem stride
piano tradition, but the sound he created from
it was so radical, it was full of dissonance,
these sharp edges. When you hear it, it's like
this beautiful conflict. You get these angular
melodies, these notes that feel like they shouldn't
be there, those flat ninths, the flat fifths.
And the way he attacked the piano, it wasn't
gentle. Not at all. It was percussive, he played
it like a drum, and then he'd just stop. He'd
leave these huge abrupt silences in the middle
of a solo. The space was as important as the
notes. It's a sound that was just radically,
completely original. And that originality, it
wasn't born in a vacuum. So let's go back to
the beginning. Section one, the formative years
and the Harlem Crucible. Right. And first up,
a little correction that's in the sources. He
was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1917.
But his birth certificate actually misspells
his first name as Felius. Pelius. Yeah. And his
middle name, Sphere, which is just so perfect
for him, that came from his grandfather, Sphere
Batts. But the real story starts in New York.
The family moves to Manhattan in 1922. He's about
four. They settle in this neighborhood called
San Juan Hill. And this move, I mean, it changed
everything. San Juan Hill was this incredibly
vibrant, tight -knit, black community. It's where
his sound was born. But that neighborhood. It's
not there anymore, is it? No, and that's the
tragedy. It was completely bulldozed, displaced
under urban renewal to make way for, among other
things, the Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts. Wow. So the place that nurtured one of
America's greatest artists was literally erased
to build a temple for, well, mostly European
classical music. That's the irony, yeah. And
his musical education there was just as unique.
He tried trumpet for a minute. Nope. Switched
to piano around age nine. And he learned from
a few different places. First, his neighbor,
a woman named Alberta Simmons. She taught him
the Harlem stride style. Okay, so for someone
listening who might not know, what exactly is
stride piano? Why is that so important? Well,
stride is all about the left hand. It literally
strides or jumps between a low bass note and
a chord higher up. It creates this huge rhythmic,
almost orchestral sound. It's a one man band
kind of piano. And the masters of that style,
Fats Waller, Yubi Blake, those were his early
influences. They were. And even more directly,
James P. Johnson, who was maybe the biggest stride
pioneer of them all. He lived in the same neighborhood.
So Munch was breathing this music in. It was
all around him. And his mother was teaching him
hymns, gospel music. You can really hear that
bluesy, soulful harmony in his later work. Absolutely.
But then he takes this little detour into classical
music. For two years, he studied with an Austrian
teacher, Simon Wolff. Learning Bach, Beethoven,
Mozart. Right. And the sources say he really
gravitated toward Chopin and Rachmaninoff, you
know, the big dramatic romantics who were already
pushing harmonic boundaries. So did any of that
classical training really stick with him? Not
in the long run. The lessons stopped once it
was clear that jazz was his entire world. But
it's so important to know he had that foundation.
Why? Because it proves that his later wrong notes,
all that dissonance. It wasn't an accident. It
wasn't because he didn't know any better. He
knew the rules perfectly well. He just chose
to break them. He also went to Stuyvesant High
School, which is for gifted kids, but he never
graduated. It just seems like from an early age,
institutional learning wasn't his path. I mean,
by 16, he's leading his own band. At 17, he's
on the road touring as a church organist or an
evangelist. Imagine that sound influencing a
young monk. All that powerful gospel harmony.
It's all part of the mix. And then comes the
place where the legend really ignites, Minton's
Playhouse. The Crucible. In the early 40s, he
becomes the house pianist there. And this wasn't
just another gig. This was the laboratory where
modern jazz was being invented. It was. It was
the after -hours spot. The musicians who were
tired of the same old swing charts would go there
to experiment. They'd have these cutting contests,
these musical duels to see who was the most innovative.
And Monk is right there. At the piano, at Ground
Zero, helping formulate Bebop with Dizzy Gillespie,
Charlie Parker, Kenny Clark. And what's so fascinating
is how Monk's music became a kind of a gatekeeper
for the new sound. Mary Lou Williams, the great
pianist, she had this amazing quote about it.
What'd she say? She said that the musicians at
Minton's worked out a music that was hard to
steal. Hard to steal. I love that. So it was
intentionally complex. Exactly. It was a way
to keep the imitators, the leeches, as she called
them, from just copying their licks without understanding
the deep harmonic work behind it. Monk's chord
changes were like a secret language. And she
even said they started copying his look, too.
The bop glasses, the beret, the whole persona
was already forming. He was a leader right from
the start and even the older generation saw it.
His first commercial recordings in 1944 were
with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet. Hawkins was
a swing giant and he was championing this weird
new pianist. That's a huge endorsement. But before
we move on, there's this one really strange symbolic
detail from around that time. 1943, he goes for
his Army physical for World War II. And an Army
psychiatrist labels him a psychiatric reject.
A psychiatric reject. He wasn't inducted. That's
incredible. We don't know the exact details,
but it suggests his unique way of being, his
quietness or his eccentricities were already
so pronounced that the establishment just flagged
him as... unfit for conformity. Which is pretty
much the perfect diagnosis for his entire musical
career. Exactly. And that refusal to conform,
it sets the stage for the next very difficult
chapter of his life. Which brings us to section
two. The cabaret card crisis and the dedication
of patrons. This is where the struggle really
kicks in. It's brutal. So in 1947, he gets introduced
to Lorraine Gordon and Alfred Lyon of Blue Note
Records. And Lorraine especially, she just immediately
believes he's a genius. She becomes his fiercest
champion. And that year, he makes his first albums
as a leader for Blue Note. The ones we now know
as Genius of Modern Music, Volume 1. Canonical
stuff. But back then. commercially they were
a total disaster a flop a complete flop lorraine
gordon tells these stories about trying to get
harlem record stores to stock them she said one
owner just told her he can't play lady what are
you doing up here the guy has two left hands
wow two left hands she had to stand there and
argue with them but Alfred Lyon, the head of
Blue Note, his commitment was just legendary.
He didn't care about sales with Monk. Really?
Not at all. He said Monk was one of three artists
he just flipped for and felt he had to record
everything they did no matter what. For him,
it was about documenting history, not making
a quick buck. So with Lorraine as his public
mouthpiece, he starts to get a little press.
She gets him a feature in the PM newspaper. But
even then, he was, well, he was Monk. He refused
to talk to the reporter unless Lorraine was in
the room with him. And she gets him a week -long
showcase at the Village Vanguard in 1948. This
should have been his big break. And the result
is just heartbreaking. She said not a single
person came. An entire week playing to an empty
room. It just shows how far ahead of his time
he was. But that obscurity was about to get a
whole lot worse because of what happened in 1951.
The cabaret card incident. This is so central
to his story. It is. He was in a car with his
friend, the brilliant but very troubled pianist
Bud Powell. The police stopped them and found
narcotics in the car. Which were presumed to
be Powell's. Everyone assumes so. Powell was
struggling badly and the police pressured Monk
to testify against his friend. And Monk just
refused. He refused out of loyalty. And the police
immediately retaliated by confiscating his New
York City cabaret card. We have to explain what
this meant. This wasn't just like losing your
driver's license. No, no. This was devastating.
The cabaret card was a license issued by the
NYPD that you needed to perform in any venue
in the city that served alcohol. So basically
every single jazz club. Every single one. Birdland,
the Vanguard, all of them. Without that card,
you were legally barred from working. It was
a tool the police often used to harass black
musicians. So for the next several years, Monk
is in exile in his own city. He can't play gigs
in Manhattan, the center of the jazz world. For
six years, it was a professional death sentence.
He had to watch everyone else, people he'd mentored,
become stars in clubs he wasn't even allowed
to enter. So how did he survive? Did he just
stop playing? No. And this is where his community
stepped up. Other musicians, like the pianist
Randy Weston, they found a workaround for him.
What'd they do? They took him to black -owned
clubs in Brooklyn and the Outer Boroughs, places
that basically ignored the law and didn't check
for cards. So he was playing these secret, unadvertised
gigs? Exactly, just to keep playing to keep the
music alive. But it was underground. Meanwhile,
he's recording for Prestige Records, making these
classic albums with Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey,
Max Roach. But they're still not selling well.
And this is when that famous rumor about him
and Miles Davis starts. Ah, yes. The Christmas
Eve session in 1954, the one that produced Bag's
Groove. The story goes that they came to blows,
that there was all this tension. Right. But Miles
himself, in his own autobiography, said it was
all a misunderstanding. It wasn't personal. It
was musical. What was the musical problem? Miles
liked pianists who would lay out, you know, play
very sparsely behind his solos to give him space.
And Monk, well, Monk was not. a sparse player.
His chords were complex, intrusive, and brilliant.
They just had two completely different ideas
about accompaniment. So it was a clash of styles,
not a fistfight. That's what Miles said. But
in 1954, he also takes his first trip to Paris.
And this is where he meets someone who will change
and probably save his life. Baroness Pannonica
de Königswerder, Nika. Nika. An heiress from
the Rothschild family who became this incredible
lifelong patroness to Monk and other jazz musicians.
And patroness doesn't even begin to cover it.
She was more than just a benefactor. Oh, absolutely.
The sources describe her as a surrogate wife
right alongside Monk's equally devoted actual
wife, Nellie. She paid bills. She dragged him
to doctors. She literally gave his family a place
to live when they needed it. And she put herself
on the line for him. The incident in Delaware
in 1958 is just incredible. It is. They were
pulled over by the police, a small amount of
marijuana was found, and she immediately took
the rap for him. She spent a few nights in jail
to protect him from another charge. That's an
unbelievable level of devotion. It shows that
even in his darkest, most difficult years, he
inspired this fierce loyalty in the people who
really understood his genius. And that support
system kept him going until his big break finally
came. Which brings us to Section 3. Riverside,
Columbia, and mainstream acceptance. And it starts
with maybe the greatest bargain in music history.
It's just insane. In 1955, Riverside Records
buys out Monk's contract from Prestige. The total
price. $108 .24. $108 .24. For felonious Monk.
It's wild. But you have to remember, he still
wasn't selling records. So the owner of Riverside,
Oren Keepnews, he comes up with a strategy. A
brilliant strategy. The idea was to ease the
public into Monk's difficult sound. So for his
first two albums on the label, he would only
play standards, familiar tunes that people already
knew. First was an album of Duke Ellington's
music, then another one called The Unique Thelonious
Monk. The listener gets to hear his strange touch
and weird harmonies, but on a melody they recognize.
And it worked. It totally worked. After those
two albums, he was ready to unleash his own stuff
again, which he did with Brilliant Corners in
1956. And that was the one. That was his first
real commercial success. The title track of that
album is a masterpiece, but it's famous for being
almost unplayably complex. Oh, it was a nightmare
to record. The tempo changed. the rhythms, the
band just couldn't get a perfect take from start
to finish. So what did they do? The producer,
Keep News, had to physically splice the tape,
editing together different parts of multiple
takes to create the final version we hear on
the record. That's amazing. And with the success
of that album, the big breakthrough happens.
His cabaret card is finally restored. And he
relaunches his New York career with a six -month
residency at the Five Spot Cafe in 1957 and the
quartet he had for that gig. My goodness. It
featured John Coltrane on tenor sax. A legendary
pairing. Coltrane said he learned so much from
Monk during that time about harmony, about rhythm.
It was a graduate -level education for him. But
tragically, because of record label conflicts,
there are very few official recordings of that
group. For decades, there was almost nothing.
Which is why it was such a huge deal when, in
2005, the Library of Congress unearthed a lost
tape. A lost tape? Yeah, a high -fidelity recording
of a concert they did at Carnegie Hall in 1957.
It had been sitting in the archives forgotten
for almost 50 years. And when it was released,
it was like hearing a ghost. It confirmed everything
people had said about how incredible that band
was. And during this period of rebirth, he writes
one of his most personal compositions, Crepuscule
with Nellie, a love song for his wife. And it's
unique in his catalog. It's described as his
only through composed piece. Meaning there's
no improvisation. Exactly. The whole thing is
written out, fixed, deliberate. For a man whose
genius was all about spontaneous invention, to
write a piece for his wife with no improvisation,
it's a statement of absolute certainty. It's
a perfect, unchangeable expression of his love
for her. The momentum just keeps building. Yeah.
After some royalty disputes with Riverside, he
makes the jump in 1962 to the biggest label of
them all, Columbia Records. This is the major
leagues, and his debut for them, Monk's Dream
in 1963, becomes the best -selling album of his
entire life. He had finally, finally arrived.
And the ultimate symbol of that arrival came
in February 1964. He's on the cover of Time magazine.
A huge cultural moment. He was only one of five
jazz musicians ever to get that honor, along
with Armstrong, Ellington, Brubick, and later
Marsalis. But the story behind that cover is
interesting. It was delayed, wasn't it? It was
the story was supposed to run in November of
63, but it got pushed back because of the assassination
of JFK. And there's also the question of why
they chose Monk for the cover over, say, Miles
Davis or Ray Charles. Right. His biographer,
Robin Kelly, suggests that Times editors saw
Monk as quirky, but ultimately less controversial,
less politically charged than Miles or Rhee were
at that time. So it was a kind of safe choice
for the establishment to embrace the avant -garde.
You could see it that way. But even with all
the success, his output of new compositions really
started to slow down during his Columbia years.
Why do you think that was? It's hard to say for
sure. The pressure of fame, constant touring,
and probably the beginning of the health issues
that would later sideline him completely. But
he did have one last burst of creativity on his
final studio album for them, Underground, in
1968. He did. It had a bunch of new tunes, including
one that's a real outlier in his work, Ugly Beauty.
What's so special about it? It's the only song
he ever wrote in 34 time. A waltz. After hundreds
of songs in 44, he just drops this one little
waltz in there at the end. And we should mention
the band he had during this period, his longest
running group, Charlie Rouse on sax. Larry Gales
on bass, Ben Reilly on drums. They were together
for more than four years, providing this incredible
stability during his peak fame, which sort of
contradicts the image of him as this impossible,
difficult artist. He could be a great band leader.
But that leads us right into the music itself.
Section four, diving deep into his technique,
his quirks and his health. We have to talk about
how he actually played the piano. And this is
the core of the Monk Paradox. We have testimony
from people like pianist Billy Taylor who said,
Monk could really play like Tatum. I mean, he
had incredible virtuosic technique if he wanted
to use it. But he chose not to. He chose not
to. He had his own philosophy, which was the
piano ain't got no wrong notes. And if you look
at how he physically approached the keyboard.
It was so unorthodox. Completely. The writer
Thomas Owens described it perfectly. He said
Monk played with a harsh, percussive attack.
He used flat fingers, not curved ones like you're
taught. He'd hold his other fingers high up in
the air. Right. And sometimes he'd even hit one
key with two fingers at once, creating these
little dissonant clusters. Owens said it sounded
like someone playing while wearing work gloves.
That is such a perfect description. It's this
rugged, powerful, maybe even clumsy sound. But
it's a deliberate choice. It's a total rejection
of flowery classical technique in favor of something
more honest and rhythmic. And harmonically, he
had his signatures, the whole tone scales. Those
create that dreamy, floating sound. And he was
a master of using silence. He would just leave
these huge gaps in his solos, forcing you to
think about the note he just played. His accompaniment
style was famous for driving his horn players
crazy. Oh, absolutely. Because he'd just start
playing right in the middle of their solo. Just
drop out completely. Yeah, leave them hanging
there with just the bass and drums. It was a
test. It forced them to be incredibly self -reliant,
to really know the harmony inside and out. And
he had his favorite key. It seems like everything
came back to B -flat for him. It was his home
base, all his great bleep tunes, Blue Monk, Mysterioso,
they're all in B -flat. His signature theme,
Thelonious, is basically just a repeated B -flat
note. It was his key. But not everyone got it.
We have to mention the critic, Philip Larkin's
famous and very cruel description of them. The
elephant on the keyboard. Yeah. It just shows
how jarring his style was to people who were
used to a more conventional idea of virtuosity.
It does. But as the 70s began, the conversation
tragically shifted from his musical quirks to
his personal health, which was in a steep decline.
By the mid -70s, he just disappears. He stops
performing. His last studio recordings are from
a 1971 tour called The Giants of Jazz. And that
tour really shows the change in him. The bassist,
Al McKibben, said Monk Barely said two words
the entire time. Just total silence. Which is
so different from what Coltrane said about him
in the 50s. The exact opposite. Coltrane said
Monk would talk about music for hours, that he
was this generous, patient teacher. So to go
from that to complete withdrawal is just, it's
a profound shift. The documentary straight. No
chaser attributes this to mental illness, which
got much worse in the late 60s. The symptoms
they describe are just harrowing. Days of manic
excitement followed by pacing, followed by long
periods of silence. And the medical care he received
was really controversial. Very. Doctors recommended
electroshock therapy, which his family refused,
thank goodness. They put him on antipsychotics,
on lithium. But later on, some doctors suggested
he might have been misdiagnosed. Misdiagnosed.
Yeah, that he might not have had bipolar disorder
or schizophrenia at all, and that the drugs they
gave him may have actually caused brain damage.
It's a heartbreaking what if. And his final six
years were spent in isolation in Nika's home
in New Jersey. In silence. There was a piano
in the room, but he never touched it. The man
who reinvented the instrument spent his last
years unable to play. He died of a stroke in
1982. Such a tragic end. Which brings us to our
last section. His enduring legacy and a very
persistent myth we need to bust. Well, the posthumous
recognition has been immense. A Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award in 93, and in 2006, a special
Pulitzer Prize. Not for a specific work, but
for his entire body of composition. A huge honor.
It really cements his place as one of the great
American composers. But now we have to talk about
the Juilliard myth. Right. This story is everywhere.
That felonious monk attended the prestigious
Juilliard School of Music. It was in his eulogy.
It's in the documentary. It's all over the Internet.
And it's just not true. So where did it come
from? It seems to be a combination of a few points
of confusion, but the main source was a music
contest he entered around 1942. The first prize
was a scholarship to Juilliard. And he won. He
placed second. He didn't get the scholarship.
Ah. And we have the perfect quote from Monk himself
that puts this whole thing to rest. We do. Years
later, the guy who did win the contest ran into
Monk and said, you know, you should have won.
And what did Monk say? Monk's reply was... I'm
glad I didn't go to the conservatory. It probably
would have ruined me. And that right there is
the whole story. That's the thesis. He believed
that formal training would have stamped out the
very thing that made him a genius. His uncompromising,
weird, brilliant individuality, which lives on
through the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz,
which is now the Herbie Hancock Institute. And
through the thousands of musicians he's influenced.
The tribute albums are countless. From jazz players
like Steve Lacey to rock stars like Donald Fagan
to the Cronus Quartet. There's even a triple
CD set by a German pianist that is a recording
of every single song Monk ever wrote. And his
name is just part of the culture now? comedians
producers punk bands even the main character
in the movie american fiction is named felonious
monk ellison he's everywhere so to sum it all
up we followed this journey from the stride piano
lessons in san juan hill to the bebop lab at
mittens through the brutal years of the cabaret
card crisis to global stardom and then finally
into that tragic silence and through it all His
legacy is this music that you just can't put
in a box. Music created entirely on his own terms,
despite what any critic or record executive said.
It's a testament to the power of artistic integrity.
He was willing to be poor, to be misunderstood,
as long as he could be himself. Which brings
us back to that final, perfect quote. I'm glad
I didn't go to the conservatory. Probably would
have ruined me. So here's the final thought for
you to take away. If Monk's genius... His angularity,
his whole unique sound, was a result of him avoiding
the established path? Does true, game -changing
originality always require standing outside the
system? Do you have to break the rules to create
something truly new? Something to think about
the next time you put on one of his B -flat blues.
Thanks for joining us for the Deep Dive.