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Thelonious Monk

Personal Profile

Thelonious Monk
  • Birth Name:
    Thelonious Sphere Monk
  • Nickname:
    Melodious, The High Priest of Bebop
    The Mad Monk
    The Genius of Modern Music
  • Date of Birth:
    October 10, 1917
  • Zodiac Sign:
    Libra
  • Place of Birth:
    Rocky Mount, North Carolina, USA
  • Place of Death:
    Englewood, New Jersey, USA
  • Date of Death:
    February 17, 1982
  • Cause of Death:
    Stroke
  • Height:
    6' 3"
  • Sex:
    Male
  • Hair Color:
    White
  • Eye Color:
    Brown
  • Nationality:
    American
  • Religion:
    Christianity
  • Education:
    Stuyvesant High School

Family

Thelonious Monk
  • Father:
    Thelonious
  • Mother:
    Barbara Monk
  • Brother:
    Thomas
  • Sister:
    Marian
  • Spouse:
    Nellie Monk
  • Son:
    Thelonious Monk Jr..

Career

Thelonious Monk

Trivia

Thelonious Monk
  • Inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1980.
  • Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 567-570. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.
  • In addition to our feature film on Thelonious Monk we will also show clips from live concerts of other great jazz artists.
  • In his lifetime Thelonious Monk acquired the aura of the “mysterious eccentric artist” who was remote and incomprehensible to the public.
  • One of the jazz world’s most unique stylists, Monk came to symbolize a pure uncompromising brand of individualism that evoked the admiration of musicians of all genres and all camps.
  • Everybody loved Monk and his compositions live on today.
  • With unforgettable images, rare film of Monk at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, first time ever seen footage of Monk in America, in Europe and Japan, the film is an intimate portrait of a genius in full force.
  • We hear commentary from his contemporaries Barry Harris, Billy Taylor, Randy Weston, and Ben Riley.
  • Producer Orrin Keepnews of Riverside records describes working with Monk through the ups and downs of his career.
  • Monk was an AmericanJazz musician.

Quotes

Thelonious Monk
  • “I’m famous. Ain’t that a bitch?”
  • “I don’t know where jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”
  • “Well, I enjoy doing it. That’s all I wanted to do anyway. I guess, you know, if I didn’t make it with the piano, I guess I would have been the biggest bum.”
  • “At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There’s no beat anymore. You can’t keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There’s a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what’s
  • “I don’t conside myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don’t have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself.”
  • “I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired, that’s all there is to it.”
  • “Where’s jazz going? I don’t know? Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”
  • “Miles’d got killed if he hit me.”
  • “Wrong is right.”
  • “I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public want — you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing — even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.”
View all Quotes: Thelonious Monk

Biography

Thelonious Monk
Last Updated: Wednesday, August 19, 2009

MonkThe first thing you need to know about Monk is that he has a crazy name. Thelonious Sphere Monk. That is his birthname. He was born October 10, 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the son of Thelonious and Barbara Monk, two years after his sister Marian. A brother, Thomas, was born a couple of years later. In 1922, the family moved to 243 West 63rd Street, in Manhattan. Monk started playing the piano at the age of six. Although he had some formal training and eavesdropped on his sister's piano lessons, he was essentially self-taught. Monk attended Stuyvesant High School, but did not graduate. He briefly toured with an evangelist in his teens, playing the church organ, and in his late teens he began to find work playing jazz.

The second thing you need to know about him is that he is one of the most important jazz composers of all time. In a few words, his reputation was for crafting really eccentric and oddball pieces which, once you got a little way through them, were immensely beautiful. His solos were pretty simplistic, frequently being comprised of just a variation on the melody and some little tinkling lines. Yet, listening to it, you can tell he’s got a very strong idea of what he wants to portray—he just does it differently from almost every other soloist.

 

Filmography

Thelonious Monk

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