For over a year, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers and scholars to share the music they’d play for a friend to get them into jazz. Now we’re focusing on Thelonious Monk, the innovative pianist and bandleader whose angular melodies and dissonant chords made him stand out among his peers in the bebop era.
Where other pianists played light chords with their left hand and quicker notes with the right, Monk played equally complicated notes with both hands, leading to complex arrangements that traversed the entire scale. But he never overplayed; his use of space between the notes elicited peace and tension equally.
“Those clashing intervals, you know?” the Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley once said. “Sometimes he’ll play, like, an F and F sharp at the same time.”
Monk was born in 1917 in Rocky Mount, N.C., and his family moved to Manhattan when he was 4. At 9, after briefly studying the trumpet, Monk started playing the piano in church and at rent parties. He attended Stuyvesant High School for two years before dropping out to play on the road with an evangelist. Monk’s big break came in 1941 when the drummer Kenny Clarke hired him to be the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. It’s been said that’s where bebop was born: Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams and others would jam all hours of the night crafting this new sound.
Monk’s solo career didn’t really take hold until the ’50s when, as a bandleader signed to Prestige Records, he recorded different ensemble sets with Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and Art Blakey, which escalated his momentum. Shortly after he signed with Riverside Records in 1955, he broke through with the album “Brilliant Corners,” an acclaimed LP seen as the true launching point of his career. He played clubs throughout New York City, gigged with the likes of John Coltrane and Gerry Mulligan, then led big bands from the late 1950s to the early ’60s. In 1964, Time put Monk on its magazine cover — the fourth jazz musician in history to appear there.
Yet you can’t talk about Monk without acknowledging his erratic behavior. He had mental health challenges and was first hospitalized in 1956; he got into a car accident and was uncommunicative when police arrived. Years later, he was diagnosed with depression. Onstage, he would sometimes get up from the piano and start dancing, leading some to believe these were autistic episodes. Others say he used dance as a way to convey to his band what he wanted to hear musically. Either way, Monk is on the Mount Rushmore of jazz, and deserves all the reverence he gets for shifting its modern sound. Below, we asked 11 musicians and writers to share their favorite Thelonious Monk songs. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own picks in the comments.