Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original »

Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. From 2003-2006, he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia Univeristy. From 1994-2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University as well the chairman of NYU's history department from 2002-2003.

One of the youngest tenured professors in a full academic discipline--at the age of 32--Kelley has spent most of his career exploring American and African-American history with a particular emphasis on African-American musical culture, including jazz and hip-hop.

"The piano ain't got no wrong notes!" So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.

In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk — witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. Indeed, Thelonious Monk is essentially a love story. It is a story of familial love, beginning with Monk's enslaved ancestors from whom Thelonious inherited an appreciation for community, freedom, and black traditions of sacred and secular song. It is about a doting mother who scrubbed floors to pay for piano lessons and encouraged her son to follow his dream. It is the story of romance, from Monk's initial heartbreaks to his lifelong commitment to his muse, the extraordinary Nellie Monk. And it is about his unique friendship with the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a scion of the famous Rothschild family whose relationship with Monk and other jazz musicians has long been the subject of speculation and rumor. Nellie, Nica, and various friends and family sustained Monk during the long periods of joblessness, bipolar episodes, incarceration, health crises, and other tragic and difficult moments.

Above all, Thelonious Monk is the gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz's most original composer.

The New York Times - August Kleinzahler

Musicians—particularly jazz musicians of Monk's period, and most especially Monk, taciturn and gnomic in utterance by nature—tend not, as writers do, to write hundreds of letters sharing with intimates what is going on in their hearts or heads. A biography of Monk, perforce, has to rely on the not always reliable, often conflicting, memories of others. Instinct is involved, surely as much as perspicacity, in sifting through the mass of observation and anecdote. The Monk family appears to have shared private material with Kelley that had hitherto been unavailable. This trust was not misplaced. There will be shapelier and more elegantly written biographies to come—Monk, the man and the music, is an endlessly fascinating subject—but I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley's. The "genius of modern music" has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves.

Preface xv

Prelude xvii

1 "My Mother Didn't Want Me to Grow Up in North Carolina" 1

2 "What Is Jazz? New York, Man!" 15

3 "I Always Did Want to Play Piano" 25

4 "We Played and She Healed" 40

5 "Why Can't You Play Music Like the Ink Spots?" 51

6 "They Weren't Giving Any Lectures" 60

7 "Since You Went Away I Missed You" 76

8 "I'm Trying to See If It's a Hit" 89

9 "Dizzy and Bird Did Nothing for Me Musically" 104

10 "The George Washington of Bebop" 122

11 "It's a Drag to Be in Jail" 143

12 "The 'Un' Years" 156

13 "France Libre!" 170

14 "Sometimes I Play Things I Never Heard Myself" 178

15 "The Greta Garbo of Jazz" 187

16 "As Long as I Can Make a Living" 198

17 "People Have Tried to Put Me Off as Being Crazy" 214

18 "My Time for Fame Will Come" 225

19 "The Police Just Mess with You ... for Nothing" 240

20 "Make Sure Them Tempos Are Right" 257

21 "Hell, I Did That Twenty-Five Years Ago" 279

22 "Bebopens Oversteprast" 298

23 "Maybe I'm a Major Influence" 310

24 "Everything Begins Here and Everything Ends Here" 327

25 "That's a Drag Picture They're Paintin' of Me" 345

26 "Sometimes I Don't Feel Like Talking" 363

27 "Let Someone Else Create Something New!" 386

28 "What Do I Have to Do? Play Myself to Death?" 409

29 "I Am Very Seriously Ill" 431

Postlude 449

Acknowledgments 453

Appendix A A Technical Note on Monk's Music 461

Appendix B Records and Tapes in Thelonious Monk's Personal Collection 463

Notes 465

Original Compositions Thelonious Monk 565

Selected Recordings Thelonious Monk 573

Selected Documentaries and Videos of Thelonious Monk 575

Index 577