Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) grew up in Manhattan and became the house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in the early 1940s, the after-hours laboratory where bebop was invented. The Gottlieb portrait above was taken there in 1947, the year of his first sessions as a leader.

Monk's playing broke every rule on purpose: flatted seconds, whole-tone runs, clusters struck with flat fingers, and silences placed where other pianists would play their fastest lines. Critics called it wrong for a decade, then spent the next fifty years catching up. In 1964 he became one of the few jazz musicians ever on the cover of Time magazine.

As a composer he is second only to Duke Ellington in how often jazz musicians record his tunes: Round Midnight, Straight No Chaser, Epistrophy, Blue Monk. His work earned a posthumous Pulitzer Prize special citation in 2006.