Thelonious Monk had two left hands, according to one Harlem record dealer
A Harlem record dealer once told Monk's champion Lorraine Gordon that the pianist couldn't play and had two left hands. Monk's jagged melodies and sudden silences sold poorly for years, yet by 2009 only Duke Ellington had been recorded more often among jazz composers, thanks to tunes like 'Round Midnight and Blue Monk.
Monk came into the world in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on October 10, 1917, and moved with his family in 1922 to the San Juan Hill district of Manhattan. He dropped the trumpet for piano at nine, learning the stride style of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson from a neighbour, and spent two years studying classical music, preferring Chopin and Rachmaninoff, until it was obvious jazz was his calling. At 17 he toured as an organist for an evangelist. In the early 1940s, as house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, he helped hammer out bebop in late-night cutting contests alongside players like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The mentor Mary Lou Williams complained that imitators even copied his beret and glasses.
Recognition came slowly. He first recorded in 1944 with Coleman Hawkins, and from 1947 Alfred Lion of Blue Note, urged on by his wife Lorraine, recorded him as a leader. She wrote to a newspaper editor calling Monk a genius nobody knew and got him a week at the Village Vanguard in 1948, where not one customer showed up. In August 1951 police found drugs in a car he shared with Bud Powell; refusing to testify against his friend, Monk lost the cabaret card needed to play New York clubs that served alcohol.
He survived on Brooklyn bars that ignored the rule and on out-of-town dates. Riverside bought out his previous contract for just $108.24, and the knotty title track of Brilliant Corners, recorded in late 1956, had to be spliced together from several takes, yet the album became his first commercial success. With his card restored, he began a celebrated six-month stand at the Five Spot Café in June 1957 with John Coltrane on saxophone.
The music leaned on clashing intervals, whole-tone runs, hard percussive attacks and dramatic pauses. On stage Monk sometimes stood up mid-tune and danced while the band kept going. A Rothschild heiress, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, became a lifelong patron. He is one of only five jazz musicians to make the cover of Time, and he died on February 17, 1982.
Source: Thelonious Monk
