biography
| name: |
Monk, Thelonious (Sphere)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1917–82)
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| biography:
| Jazz musician, born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, USA. He was raised in New York and received piano lessons at age 11. Two years later he accompanied his mother's singing at a local Baptist church and began playing piano at parties in Harlem. He led a trio at a neighbourhood bar c.1934, then spent two years touring with an evangelist. He attended Juilliard briefly in the late 1930s, and during 1939–44 worked as a sideman with Keg Purnell, Kenny Clarke, Lucky Millinder, and Kermit Scott. As one of the key innovators of modern jazz, he also appeared regularly in the early 1940s at Minton's Playhouse, Clark Monroe's, and other Harlem after-hours clubs and rehearsal sessions where the rudiments of the new style were being developed. He made his recording debut with Coleman Hawkins (1944), appearing with the saxophonist's quintet for two years, then played with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra (1946). He began leading his own group (1947) in New York, and for the next seven years he recorded for Blue Note and Prestige and was at the height of his creativity as a composer, but he remained an enigmatic, underground figure. In 1951 he was convicted for drug possession and deprived of his cabaret card, which precluded him from working in New York nightclubs for six years. He performed occasionally during this period, including an appearance at the Paris Jazz Fair in 1954, and continued to record as a leader and sideman. In 1957 he returned to New York club work with a celebrated engagement at the Five Spot Cafe featuring his new quartet with John Coltrane, and he appeared on CBS-TV's The Sound of Jazz that year. By 1961, when he formed a permanent quartet and began recording for Columbia Records, many of his compositions had become standards, among them ‘Round Midnight’, ‘Straight No Chaser’, ‘Blue Monk’, and ‘Ruby My Dear’. He toured the US continually throughout the 1960s, with also tours of Europe (1961) and Japan (1964). In 1964 he was featured in a Time magazine cover story, one of only five jazz musicians to have received such distinction. He accepted fewer engagements in the late 1960s, but toured internationally with the Giants of Jazz in 1971–2. He made his last major public appearance at the 1974 Newport Jazz Festival, and thereafter a combination of illness and voluntary inactivity kept him from performing. |
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