Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982) was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and grew up in San Juan Hill, on the West Side of Manhattan. He started on the piano as a child and was playing in public by his teens.

In the early 1940s he was the house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, in a band with Kenny Clarke on drums; Charlie Christian and the young Dizzy Gillespie came to sit in after hours. He recorded for Blue Note from 1947: Round Midnight, Ruby, My Dear, Well, You Needn't, Misterioso, Epistrophy.

In 1951 New York took away his cabaret card, and with it the right to play in the city's clubs. He got it back in 1957 and opened at the Five Spot Café with John Coltrane that summer. Brilliant Corners had come out on Riverside earlier that year.

From 1962 he recorded for Columbia, toured Europe and Japan with the quartet and, in February 1964, was on the cover of Time. He stopped performing in the mid-1970s and died in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1982.

Snapshots

At the piano, Minton's Playhouse, New York, around September 1947. William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress
Night concert at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, 15 April 1961. Anefo, Nationaal Archief
With Howard McGhee, Minton's Playhouse, September 1947. William P. Gottlieb
Amsterdam, 14 February 1964, before a night concert at the Concertgebouw. Jack de Nijs for Anefo, Nationaal Archief