Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk built a body of now-standard jazz compositions — ''Round Midnight,' 'Straight, No Chaser,' 'Well, You Needn't' — out of an angular, dissonant, rhythmically off-kilter piano style that took years for critics and audiences to catch up to. A fixture of Minton's Playhouse during bebop's incubation in the early 1940s, he didn't record as a leader until 1947 and didn't reach wide fame until a 1964 Time magazine cover; he remains, by some counts, the second-most-recorded jazz composer in history after Duke Ellington. His music was essential listening for the young musicians drawn to New York and Detroit's bebop clubs, Alice Coltrane among them.
we haven’t charted Thelonious Monk yet
this stretch of the river isn’t mapped. we trace the watershed one artist at a time — and we’re always heading further upstream.