DOUG QUACKENBUSH/COURTESY OLGA QUACKENBUSH Thelonious Monk at the 30th Street Studios, 1964

"You know people have tried to put me off as being crazy," said Thelonious Sphere Monk. "Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy." He ought to have known. Monk was one of only a few jazz musicians to appear on the cover of Time magazine (others include Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Knuckles Ellington and Wynton Marsalis) and was celebrated as a genius by everyone who mattered. Bud Powell, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins could not have imagined (or transmuted) the linguistic communication of jazz without him. Yet the pianist was also constantly underpaid and underappreciated, rejected every bit as well weird on his way upwardly and dismissed every bit old lid once he made his improbable climb. Performer and composer, eccentric and original, Monk was shrouded in mystery throughout his life. Not an especially loquacious artist (at least with journalists), he left almost of his expression in his inimitable work, every bit stunning and unique as anyone'due south in jazz–2d only to Duke Ellington'southward and perched alongside Charles Mingus'south.

He did go out a newspaper trail, though, and Robin D.M. Kelley'due south exhaustive, necessary and, as of now, definitive Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original offers a Baedeker of sorts. Jazz may be filled with fascinating characters, but it has inspired relatively few exemplary full-length biographies. (Amidst the exceptions are David Hajdu'due south Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn; John Chilton'due south Sidney Bechet: The Sorcerer of Jazz; Linda Kuehl's unfinished With Billie, assembled by Julia Blackburn after Kuehl's death; and John Szwed'due south So What: The Life of Miles Davis.) Kelley is, in many ways, a rarity. While many music journalists write apprentice history, Kelley is an eminent historian at the University of Southern California. Rarer nonetheless, though his earlier books (including Race Rebels and Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!) examine race from a neo-Marxist perspective, his thinking took an apparent turn during the fourteen years he spent on the Monk project. While discussions of race and racism are recurrent–how could they not be in a biography of a mentally sick black genius in the middle of the twentieth century?–Kelley shows admirable restraint by never addressing politics beyond their appropriate office or treating Monk'southward life as a political fable. Monk, a black man from humble origins, succeeded at condign a bourgeois creative person with a wealthy, devoted patron, and he is never criticized for information technology. Unlike Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Nina Simone and many others, Monk did not enlist in the struggles for freedom or power. Music and daily life proved to be difficult enough.

Kelley has created a lush portrait of the private, off-camera Monk, one it would have been difficult to paint without the unprecedented admission he had to the Monk family, including Nellie, Monk's widow, who provided substantial information before her death in 2002, and their son, Toot (otherwise known as TS), who opened up the athenaeum once trust had been established. Kelley shows the states the man who, when he wasn't getting work in the early 1950s, played Mr. Mom. He shows the states the musician who, when he wasn't at abode, needed some sort of neighborhood scout to brand sure he didn't drift in the wrong direction. It took a village. He had a family unit who tolerated his eccentricities and never pressured him to take a day job. Mingus had to work at the mail office when freelance piece of work was hard to come by; no matter how lean things got, Monk was able to work at the eighty-8 keys in his living room.

Born in Northward Carolina in 1917 and raised in the predominantly African-American San Juan Colina neighborhood on what is at present Manhattan's Upper West Side, Monk went from obscurity to notoriety to seclusion–from glorious, hard-fought music to inscrutable silence. At times he boomeranged from Bellevue to the Hamlet Vanguard to Rikers Isle to the 30th Street Studios of Columbia Records and back over again. But 1 thing was for sure: in a certain scene, amongst a certain fix, in boho corners of the 1950s, crazy was that twelvemonth'due south model. "Crazy, human!" was the rallying weep of the Beats, parodied by Norman Mailer, who even so believed, as a Bellevue alum himself, the hype about hip. Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath did stints in McLean Hospital; Allen Ginsberg, who saw the best minds of his generation starving, hysterical, naked, possessed a Bellevue pedigree; and John Berryman proclaimed himself a demented priest. Sanity was supposedly for squares.

Notwithstanding for all its colloquial ability, crazy (or even "Crazy, man!") is not in the DSM-IV. Nosotros have non a shopworn adjective but a clinical diagnosis for what ailed Monk. He suffered, as Kelley explains, from bipolar disorder, although his affliction was misdiagnosed and mistreated throughout the latter part of his career. Like other blackness jazz musicians (Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus), Monk was more than likely to be called schizophrenic, or just plain basics, than were blue bloods similar Cal Lowell. Monk took "vitamin shots" from a "Doctor Feelgood" who dosed his patients with amphetamines. Kelley ventures that Monk, who alluded to his enigmatic psyche in songs like "Nutty" and "Misterioso," somewhen stopped playing entirely a few years later he began taking lithium in 1972; after his final concert at Carnegie Hall (and an impromptu Quaternary of July performance at Bradley'southward) in 1976, he inappreciably played or spoke until his death in 1982.

In his performing heyday–from the late 1940s to the early on '70s–Monk could be brilliant and hating at the same time, reinventing jazz composition while wearing nighttime glasses indoors. During bass or tenor solos, he would either leave the phase birthday or dance with himself. He favored a kind of arrhythmic twirl, which he would usually complement with a counterintuitive hat; he seemed similar someone giving himself the spins. Occasionally he would add a genu kick, which would brand the gyrations seem intentional, or at least syncopated. Frequently he would just seem like the man who wasn't there, a real gone guy. Just one time the bass solo was over, he'd return in a rush to the piano, often with a cigarette in his mouth, and, in his near inspired moments, create a pour of sounds so ornate and gorgeous that it was described, by New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett, as a "vinegary, dissonant, gothic" tone.

That description has aged better than nigh; Balliett was the most metaphorical of American jazz critics. For most Monk watchers, though, the man–crazy, gifted and black–was, higher up all, a metaphor. Forget about his detractors. Kelley shows with damning precision that some of Monk's about fervid advocates went downwardly the most benighted of infantilizing or primitivist paths. Lewis Lapham, in a sympathetic 1964 profile in the Saturday Evening Post, wrote that as an "emotional and intuitive man, possessing a kid's vision of the earth, Monk talks, sleeps, eats, laughs, walks or dances every bit the spirit moves him." Monk may have seemed that way to strangers, especially when he posed sitting in a child'south red wagon for an album cover photograph, but to truly do Monk justice one must, as Kelley has done, reconcile his eccentricities with an appreciation of the deep, original thinking present in the music. Too, testimony from Monk'due south family, at to the lowest degree in his less gone years, presents a different portrait of an appreciating father and husband–when he wasn't disappearing on drug runs. And while he oft spoke to interviewers in breviloquent grunts, musicians say he sometimes talked shop with them for hours. He was complicated, flawed and progressively ill–a more than nuanced effigy than the flimsy characterization of the fashion-out jazz cat could possibly convey.

In that location is a much-quoted line in Charlotte Zwerin'south 1988 documentary Straight, No Chaser in which Monk is told that he is in an encyclopedia alongside popes and presidents, and is therefore famous. Every bit he absorbs this information he is patently enlightened that he is being filmed. His response? "I'yard famous. Ain't that a bitch?"

It was indeed oftentimes a bitch to be Thelonious Monk. Because of a police that was eventually struck downwards past New York City Mayor John Lindsay in 1967, Monk repeatedly lost his "cabaret bill of fare." The carte du jour was a prized possession considering information technology permitted musicians to play in establishments serving booze, and any cardholder who was arrested had to forfeit the gilded ticket. Monk lost his repeatedly, once when he was arrested while sitting in a auto with his love friend Bud Powell, who was, according to Kelley, the 1 carrying heroin, merely each was besides loyal to the other to snitch; and in one case considering he had the temerity, as a Negro in Jim Crow America, to demand service at a hotel in Delaware. (Monk took many police beatings for that one.) This was no way to treat a genius; it was no mode to care for a human being.

Monk also felt undervalued and, of course, underpaid. The standard biography, the one the narrator delivers at the offset of Straight, No Chaser, is that Monk attended Juilliard and helped invent bebop with Charlie Parker and Light-headed Gillespie. The truth, as elucidated by Kelley, is messier. Monk never attended Juilliard; he attended New York's illustrious Stuyvesant High Schoolhouse but never graduated. He was not holding the pianoforte chair at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem when bebop was beingness hatched, and he afterwards fought a losing boxing with Gillespie for bop ownership rights. Bop, contrary to Straight, No Chaser and Ken Burns'southward Jazz, was not ane big happy family. Monk was the business firm pianist at Minton's in 1941, a few years before Parker and Gillespie created a musical revolution, and his legendary band in that location included the barometrically influential guitarist Charlie Christian and the drummer Kenny "Klook" Clarke. When Monk wasn't in the procedure of sculpting his own sound (and vital harmonic breakthroughs for bebop), he was sometimes falling comatose at the bandstand or gone altogether.

Yet even afterward he was let get by Minton's, at the end of 1941, he was always welcome to render, and Powell or whoever else was occupying the demote would step aside. (Powell was a former acolyte of Monk'due south, every bit brilliant, equally original and equally mentally ill, however another Bellevue grad.) Minton's jam sessions became dominated by marquee names similar Gillespie and Parker. Even though Monk would sometimes sit in with the band, and even though they would routinely merchandise choruses on gestating Monk classics like "'Round Midnight," his contributions to the festivities often went uncredited. Gillespie, a consummate showman and trickster, was cannily making a name for himself. Monk had no gig, no label, nothing sacred merely the integrity of his mind. Afterwards Lorraine Panthera leo (now Gordon) dubbed him the High Priest of Bebop to publicize his 1947 debut, Genius of Modern Music, the tag would be flung dorsum at him with withering irony by those who were not yet convinced. And when Monk played in Gillespie's ring in 1946, he missed rehearsals, showed up late for gigs and somewhen was fired. Monk and Gillespie would reunite on the 1971-2 Giants of Jazz tour, and past then everything seemed copacetic; the revolution was a matter of history, and it was paying decent dividends to the 2 titans by and so.

The boxing over bop'southward ownership rights obscures something crucial: the music Monk was writing by the mid-1940s was certifiably weirder than standard bebop. He disliked playing fast, although his fiercest partisans claimed he could play like Art Tatum if he wanted to–just equally Picasso could, if he wanted to, pigment like a realist. (In that location is just anecdotal evidence for this claim about Monk, and he doesn't really need information technology.) In the midst of his angular melodies and deft use of space, Monk'due south cascades were whole tone flourishes, like a ragged stepchild to Tatum'southward ornate runs. He got his beginning tape deal with Alfred King of beasts on the fledgling Blue Annotation characterization, and the album delivered on its title, although its anemic sales showed that the genius of modernistic music didn't always enjoy company. The album–bristling and raw, like its audio quality–showcases Monk standards before they sounded inevitable, or indeed fifty-fifty comprehensible for those just getting used to bebop's breakneck pace. Monk jumped on chestnuts similar "Nice Work If You lot Can Become It" and "Apr in Paris" and pounded them with his inimitable descending cadences, translating everything he touched into a rough but non quite fix Monkian patois. Past the time a companion album appeared in 1952, Monk had recorded most of what would become his songbook. After warming up the listener with a couple of recognizably bebop tunes–up-tempo, with eighth-note melodic lines–and bop-inflected standards, he plays equally if he's leaning into the instrument with his whole body, making those eighty-eight keys into percussion instruments. His fingers are splayed, their attack every bit distinctive and inimitable as anyone's in jazz; within a few bars, he is instantly recognizable to any serious jazz listener.

How, betwixt his Minton'southward apprenticeship in 1941 and his recording debut in 1947, did Monk get Monk? The pianist on those Minton's dates–who can exist heard, murkily, on The Early on Thelonious Monk–sounds in the neighborhood of Teddy Wilson'due south swing and James Johnson'south stride. In between, he got fired from two illustrious piano spots, avoided military service and recorded some sides with Coleman Hawkins, the nigh notable swing-era star who could play with the beboppers he so vividly influenced. Monk joined Hawkins'southward band in 1944 and cut a few 78s with him. While Monk received no royalties for the sessions, they paid off in other means. The format of the 78 limited each rail to around 3 minutes, and none of Monk's tunes were used. Nevertheless, he made the most of his time. "His economical solos are total of Monkisms: whole-tone scales, dissonant clusters, and quotes from his own compositions," Kelley observes, with the attuned ear of a writer who too plays the piano, which is all just an bibelot in the world of jazz writing for the popular printing. Every bit early every bit 1944, these recordings, bachelor on Thelonious Monk: The Complete Prestige Recordings, reveal Monk's attack, nuances and references as the motifs of "an American original."

Whether Monk was playing the music of Hawkins, Gershwin or Ellington, he acted like he endemic it. When, on Genius of Modernistic Music, he introduced the globe to "Thelonious" (a deceptively simple melodic argument), "Ruby, My Honey" (a beautiful tribute to an early flame), "Well, You Needn't," "Monk's Mood," "'Round Midnight" and–an hommage to his erstwhile protégé–"In Walked Bud," based on the chords of Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," about of the globe was not ready. Parker and Gillespie were testing listeners with jazz you weren't supposed to dance to. Monk was offering music fifty-fifty less user-friendly: weird, rough flourishes and runs that sounded ingeniously rhythmic to his exegetes and harsh to his detractors. Information technology's true that, unlike the and then-called correct-handed pianists of bop, Monk stuck with former-time stride; James Johnson, Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum particularly never left his vocabulary. No 1 hitting those keys with such inimitable muscle. But in 1947 it didn't yet sound like mass entertainment. Monk chosen one of his final compositions "Ugly Dazzler." It would be a decade until the world came around. He was in a holding pen, a catamenia his wife, Nellie, called the "'un' years."

When Monk got his cabaret bill of fare dorsum in 1957 after spending a few years without it, jazz had already swung from bop to postbop. Charlie Parker had died in 1955, his 34-year-old torso ravaged by heroin and booze, and the bold trumpeter Clifford Brown, all of 25 years old, had perished in a car crash the post-obit year. There was room for new gods. John Coltrane had been kicked out of Miles Davis's band for being a junkie, and while he was cleaning upwardly–and kick the booze he was imbibing to stave off withdrawal symptoms–he joined Monk's band for a six-month appointment. Coltrane would often practise the entire day in search of the perfect audio, replacing his addiction to heroin with devotion to the forest shed, and so he would get on the bandstand with Monk and continue the quest, using all of Monk'south harmonic twists and turns to improvise a dumbo and lovely spiritual. Monk's quartet–aslope Coltrane was Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass and Shadow Wilson on drums–found a home at the 5 Spot, a order located on the Bowery years before there was a gentrified neighborhood called the East Hamlet. The Five Spot held poetry readings on Mondays, when Monk was off.

By the time the Five Spot gig ended, Coltrane had returned to Davis's band and would soon be besides big to be a sideman, and Monk had strode out of obscurity forever. Many remember the six-month residency as a turning point when Coltrane became a legend. Sonny Rollins, whose star rose before Coltrane'due south, as well remembered Monk as an incomparable instructor. Each of them attempted to play beyond the boundaries of what their instruments were made to do. They tried to copy Monk's musical sense on an instrument that could only play one annotation at a time. Withal, they honked where Monk banged, countering his cascades and circuitous phrases with their own runs, with their ain personalities, in their own complementary vocabulary. They played with such speed, dexterity and obsession that each gear up a bar for the tenor saxophone that has still non been superseded half a century later. The grunting seer with the beret at the keys lit the match.

Once Monk saw success, he stopped composing, with the exception of Underground (1968), his final album for Columbia, which contained four new tunes, each of them equally witty and idiosyncratic as always. His illness as well started manifesting itself unevenly through silence. At that place were times in clubs when Monk wasn't simply laying out–he was zoning out, staring into space, catatonic; weeks subsequently, he could be his quondam self again. But silence was also part of Monk's artful, even if, compared with the minimalism of Miles Davis (whom he was instructed not to play behind on a famous and gorgeous 1954 recording of "The Man I Dearest"), he was more than of a maximalist, playing meandering lines and cascading whole tone runs backside his soloists and and so often playing rococo countermelodies when he soloed. During much of the '60s Monk was oft accused of repeating the same old tunes, even doing the same old trip the light fantastic. Merely his listen wasn't veering into autopilot. It was nevertheless in overdrive. He wasn't repeating; he was perfecting.

His '60s versions of his late '40s masterpieces audio more than polished, but they are still chock with new ideas, new approaches, new variations–even if, at the tiptop of free jazz, he only continually instructed his sidemen to do nothing but swing. The term has never been empirically defined, only it has something to practice with rhythmic flexibility. For Monk, information technology also had a expressionless-center aim, a musical kick in the stomach. "Bright Mississippi," recorded on Monk'southward Dream (1962), reveals Monk in lockstep with the tenor player Charlie Rouse, his near constant musical companion of the 1960s, bashing out quarter notes with what would audio similar simplicity if they didn't hit that sweetness spot of swing with such force. He even gave swinging orders to bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian when he had them on a pickup appointment; each of them had a more indirect route to swing in their archetype stints with pianist Bill Evans and LaFaro'southward memorable plough with Ornette Coleman. They were indirect white guys who suddenly had to articulate something–Monk's matter. Both of them must have emerged from their weekend stint like it was boot camp.

You tin can still hear joy and exuberance on Monk'southward The London Drove (1971), on which he was accompanied past Art Blakey. Monk hardly sounds like he'south on his way out, even though it would exist his final major recording session, shared, like his first, with Blakey. A few scattered performances (including Paul Jeffrey on tenor and Toot on drums) early on in that decade still had, co-ordinate to those who were there, the same former burn down. And suddenly, it was over. Did he simply get too far within himself and never return? Did his treatment for bipolar disorder somehow cure him of the music bug too? Did he have new musical ideas trapped in a recalcitrant trunk? Kelley suggests the more prosaic possibility that he was suffering from an enlarged prostate.

Monk had already moved into the spacious domicile of the Baroness Pannonica "Nica" de Koenigswarter (Parker'south erstwhile patron) in Weehawken, New Bailiwick of jersey, with a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline and an even more spectacular number of cats. Monk had become likewise much for his wife to handle, and Nellie didn't object to his relocating to a mansion beyond the Hudson. Pannonica inspired a Monk ballad of the aforementioned name, but there is no evidence that they were lovers. Nica kept a piano by Monk'southward room, but Monk nigh never touched information technology. "If his health improved and his manic-depressive cycles were under control," Kelley writes, "why did he finish playing? Having spent the ameliorate office of 14 years tracing Monk's every step, I was not surprised by his conclusion. In fact, I wondered why he did not retire before." Kelley is a judicious biographer, but I notice this conclusion difficult to accept. Monk told Sonny Rollins that when all else failed, in that location was e'er music. Music was not to be allow go, no matter how unsteady things got, and by all accounts in the book, the later performances, except for the final one, were still filled with magic. Possibly with more than equilibrium, though, Monk was not inspired to sit down down at the piano and feign his nigh inspired moments–which came, at to the lowest degree in function, from a place of serious disease.

In 2006 a posthumous Pulitzer was bestowed on Monk. Since 1987 the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz has given awards to promising musicians with chops far smoother than those of its namesake. Monk the shrine will continue to be polished. Monk the man is only beginning to be understood, and Kelley's book admirably helps usa capeesh the pleasures and pathos of an exceedingly heavy caput case. Only no affair how much Monk is demystified, he will still be weird and at that place will nonetheless be new things to larn just by trying to puzzle him out on the page or at the pianoforte.

Monk liked to wear a formidable ring bearing his proper noun when he played, an encumbrance that no pianist in his right mind would want to burden a hand with. While he was flashing his band for the world to see, from his ain perspective he saw something else. "KNOW" said the ring, more or less, to the audience. "MONK" was the answer when he saw information technology himself.