He was only 64 years old.Ī reluctant interviewee with a penchant for epigrams"There ain't no wrong notes on the piano," "Silence is the loudest noise," "Everybody is a genius at being themselves"Monk was, in contemporary parlance, a "race man," that is, he believed in the equality of all races and was angered by the mistreatment of blacks by whites. On 5 February 1982, Monk suffered a massive stroke and passed twelve days later. He emerged only for neighbourhood walkabouts, and eventually stopped even leaving his room. Beset by longstanding mental health issues beyond contemporary diagnosis and treatment, and which by the turn of the decade had reduced him to near catatonia, Monk moved from Manhattan into the New Jersey home of his longtime benefactor, the Rothschild heiress Baroness Pannonica De Koenigswarter.
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He was happy to dig deep into what he already had, finding new perspectives and possibilities within it.īy the late 1970s, Monk had stopped performing. As one of his obituarists observed, Monk, like the painter Paul Cézanne with his ceaseless studies of Mont St Victoire, felt no need to find fresh inspiration for his muse. Through all of this, Monk continued to record great music, though his composing output slowed up from the mid 1960s onwards, with most albums typically containing just one new piece. During his few remaining years of activity, Monk moved from one small specialist label to another. Yet in 1970, unable to find a mainstream audience for Monk, and so recoup their investment, Columbia let his contract lapse. In 1964, Monk received the era's ultimate seal of establishment approval, the cover of TIME magazine. Reviewers placed him in what Keepnews called "the automatic five-star category," and in 1961, Columbia lured Monk from Riverside with a deal rumoured to be almost as valuable as the one they had given to Miles Davis six years earlier. Prestige had no more success than Blue Note, and in 1955, Riverside's Orrin Keepnews was able to buy Monk's contract from Weinstock for just $108.27.īut by 1957, Monk's time had finally arrived. But five years later, unable to break Monk beyond a tiny audience of jazz musicians and cognoscenti, Lion cut his losses and let Prestige's Bob Weinstock take him on.
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Things started well in 1947, when Alfred Lion signed him to Blue Note. While his music no longer has the power to shock that it once possessed, it still comes across as unique, profound and thrilling.ĭuring his lifetime, however, the course of Monk's career was as craggy as the contours of his music. Lionised by jazz fans and a continuing influence on musicians, Monk in 2020 is also held to be a hero by the hip hop movement. Thelonious Monk's position in cultural history grows in stature with each passing year and every new generation.