Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on the tenth of October 1917. When he was four, his mother brought the children north to the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, settling on West 63rd Street near the Hudson River. There, in a crowded and musical quarter, the young boy first found the piano, teaching himself by reading music over his sister's shoulder as she took her lessons.

He learned informally at first, absorbing the stride style from a neighbor before undertaking a period of formal study, and by his teens he was accompanying a traveling evangelist and playing rent parties. In the early 1940s he became house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where, alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Kenny Clarke, he helped forge the harmonic and rhythmic language that would become bebop.

Monk's genius lay in the singular architecture of his playing and writing: angular melodies, unexpected silences, dissonances struck with deliberate weight. Compositions such as "'Round Midnight," "Blue Monk," and "Straight, No Chaser" entered the permanent canon, and "'Round Midnight" became one of the most recorded jazz standards of all time. As of 2009 he stood as the second-most-recorded jazz composer in history, after Duke Ellington.

Long misunderstood, then celebrated, he graced the cover of Time magazine in 1964 and shaped generations of musicians before his death in Englewood, New Jersey, on the seventeenth of February 1982. May the high priest of an American music be honored, his silences as revered as his sound.