Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk sounded wrong to a lot of people at first, and then, slowly, sounded like the only one who was right. His piano playing was full of jagged angles, clashing notes, sudden silences, and odd hesitations – choices that seemed like mistakes until you realized he meant every one. He was building a whole musical language out of what other pianists were trained to avoid.

As a composer he’s in the very top rank. Tunes like “’Round Midnight,” “Straight, No Chaser,” and “Blue Monk” are jazz standards now, but they’re deceptively hard – quirky, precise little structures that don’t play themselves. Musicians spend careers learning to navigate them. “’Round Midnight” may be the most recorded jazz composition ever written.

For years he was dismissed as eccentric, even incompetent, and a cabaret-card suspension kept him off New York stages through much of the 1950s. Then the tide turned. A long run at the Five Spot, a contract with a major label, and finally a 1964 Time magazine cover – recognition, late, of what he’d been doing all along.

He was a genuine original in person too: the hats, the spinning dance he’d do beside the piano while his band played, the long silences. The mind was always working, even when the world couldn’t follow it. Especially then.