Thelonious Monk

Monk married Nellie Smith in 1947, and the couple had a son, T. S. Monk two years after the wedding, who is a jazz drummer. A daughter, Barbara Monk, was born in 1953.

His mental health started declining in the 1960s and by mid 1970s he became a recluse because of his mental condition. He was put on antipsychotics and lithium, but there was no change in his mental instability.

In the last six years of his life, Monk was invited to live in Weehawken, New Jersey home of his longtime friend and patron, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter and he died of a stroke on February 17, 1982. He was buried in New York.

Thelonious Monk was born on October 10, 1917 in North Carolina to Thelonious and Barbara Monk. The family moved to Manhattan, New York City, when Monk was only 4 years old - he lived there for almost 50 years of his life.

Monk started to play piano from the age of six, learning just by observing his sister playing the instrument. His strong inclination to music took him to study theoretical music at the Juilliard School of Music.

He was so proficient in the art that by the time he was 13, he had won so many weekly amateur competitions at the Apollo Theater that the management barred him from contesting ever again.

Monk attended the Stuyvesant High School for some time but drooped out of it to pursue his passion, music. In the pursuit of it, he travelled with an evangelist ‘Texas Warhorse’ and played the church organ.

Monk started to play jazz with small bands in his late teens. In 1941, he joined the house band at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where he eventually helped in the construction of a jazz school called Bebop.

In 1944, Monk recorded his first tunes with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet. He was a significant jazz musician who helped Monk realize his destiny. In the following years, he recorded as a leader for Blue Note.

Monk did some sporadic recording sessions for Blue Note during 1947–1952, but immediately after that he signed a contract with the Prestige Records for two years. He recorded numerous noteworthy, but unpublicized, albums with prestige Records.

In 1954, Monk went to Europe for the first time, and performed and recorded in Paris. He was introduced there to Baroness Pannonica "Nica" de Koenigswarter, who was also a patroness of several New York jazz musicians. They became very good friends.

In 1955, Monk released ‘Thelonious Monk Plays the Music of Duke Ellington’ with Riverside to gain commercial status, for he was a musical genius in the eyes of the critics but did not have a rapport with the general audience.

Monk recorded ‘Brilliant Corners’ in 1956 and composed his own music for the first time for Riverside records. Some of the compositions were so complex that it needed multiple editing sessions but the album was his first commercial success.

Monk received commercial success after he signed with Columbia Records. His album ‘Monk’s Dream (1963)’ was a critical and commercial hit. Owing to that, he became one of the few jazz artists to have featured on the cover of Time magazine.