Blue Monk
Thelonious Monk
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Browse piano sheets by Thelonious Monk on Zen Virtual Piano. NCpedia says Monk had slipped into virtual obscurity by the early 1950s, when his cabaret card, needed for work in establishments serving liquor, was revoked for six years. In 1957 came the turning point: he released Brilliant Corners, Riverside’s first issue of his original compositions. Later that year, through the assistance of the Baroness de Koenigswarter, he obtained a cabaret card and could resume paid engagements in New York City. A loss of work, a cabaret card and a record of his own tunes put a licence and a label side by side, two kinds of permission, one for working on stage and one for being heard on record. Monk brought together a quartet of himself, John Coltrane, Wilbur Ware and Shadow Wilson at the Five Spot Cafe in the summer of 1957, and the engagement continued through New Year’s Eve 1957. NCpedia calls this now legendary engagement the one that paved the way for his rediscovery as a major figure in modern jazz. A residency at a single cafe that is still remembered sets a regular stage beside a quartet’s standing. Thelonious Monk was born on 10 October 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and when he was four his mother and his two siblings moved to New York City. He studied the trumpet briefly but began exploring the piano at age nine. In his early teens he was already playing rent parties and sitting in on organ and piano at a local Baptist church, and he was reputed to have won several amateur hour competitions at the Apollo Theater. A teenager at rent parties, at church organs and reputedly at the Apollo can be read as a pianist who learned in many rooms at once. Britannica calls his playing percussive and sparse, often called angular, and says he used complex and dissonant harmonies and unusual intervals and rhythms. Many of his compositions, generally written in the 12-bar blues or 32-bar ballad form, became jazz standards; Britannica lists among his best-known works Well, You Needn’t, Straight, No Chaser, Epistrophy, Blue Monk and ’Round Midnight. His quartet toured Europe in 1961 and Japan in 1963. In a National Jazz Archive interview he said that all the musicians who were thinking liked his music and wanted to learn how to play the songs his group was playing. The Pulitzer site lists a posthumous Special Citation to him for his body of distinguished and innovative musical composition, which the site says has had a significant and enduring impact on how jazz evolved. A sparse and angular style that still produced standards, with fellow musicians eager to learn the songs, hints at tunes that held up when other people played them.
Browse piano sheets by Thelonious Monk on Zen Virtual Piano.
NCpedia says Monk had slipped into virtual obscurity by the early 1950s, when his cabaret card, needed for work in establishments serving liquor, was revoked for six years. In 1957 came the turning point: he released Brilliant Corners, Riverside’s first issue of his original compositions. Later that year, through the assistance of the Baroness de Koenigswarter, he obtained a cabaret card and could resume paid engagements in New York City. A loss of work, a cabaret card and a record of his own tunes put a licence and a label side by side, two kinds of permission, one for working on stage and one for being heard on record.
Monk brought together a quartet of himself, John Coltrane, Wilbur Ware and Shadow Wilson at the Five Spot Cafe in the summer of 1957, and the engagement continued through New Year’s Eve 1957. NCpedia calls this now legendary engagement the one that paved the way for his rediscovery as a major figure in modern jazz. A residency at a single cafe that is still remembered sets a regular stage beside a quartet’s standing.
Thelonious Monk was born on 10 October 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and when he was four his mother and his two siblings moved to New York City. He studied the trumpet briefly but began exploring the piano at age nine. In his early teens he was already playing rent parties and sitting in on organ and piano at a local Baptist church, and he was reputed to have won several amateur hour competitions at the Apollo Theater. A teenager at rent parties, at church organs and reputedly at the Apollo can be read as a pianist who learned in many rooms at once.
Britannica calls his playing percussive and sparse, often called angular, and says he used complex and dissonant harmonies and unusual intervals and rhythms. Many of his compositions, generally written in the 12-bar blues or 32-bar ballad form, became jazz standards; Britannica lists among his best-known works Well, You Needn’t, Straight, No Chaser, Epistrophy, Blue Monk and ’Round Midnight. His quartet toured Europe in 1961 and Japan in 1963. In a National Jazz Archive interview he said that all the musicians who were thinking liked his music and wanted to learn how to play the songs his group was playing. The Pulitzer site lists a posthumous Special Citation to him for his body of distinguished and innovative musical composition, which the site says has had a significant and enduring impact on how jazz evolved. A sparse and angular style that still produced standards, with fellow musicians eager to learn the songs, hints at tunes that held up when other people played them.
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Thelonious Monk
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Thelonious Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer, born on 10 October 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
It is the 1957 album that NCpedia calls the first Riverside issue containing Monk’s original compositions, and part of the turning point of his career.
They include Well, You Needn’t, Straight, No Chaser, Epistrophy, Blue Monk and ’Round Midnight.
The quartet included Monk, John Coltrane, Wilbur Ware and Shadow Wilson.