Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk, born in Rocky Mount in 1917, wrote a whole shelf of the standards every jazz player has to learn, "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud" and "Well, You Needn't" among them, and he played piano like nobody before or since. His music is all angles and dissonance, crooked melodies and wrong-sounding notes that turn out to be exactly right, stride piano and sudden whole-tone runs, with a hard, percussive attack and silences that hang in the air like a dare.

He looked the part too, in his suits, hats and sunglasses, and on the bandstand he would sometimes get up from the piano mid-tune and dance for a while as the band played on. He recorded for Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside and Columbia, and in 1957 came Mulligan Meets Monk, which includes a version of "'Round Midnight".

He became one of only five jazz musicians to make the cover of Time magazine, and as of 2009 he was the second-most-recorded jazz composer ever, behind only Duke Ellington. He died in 1982; a Pulitzer Prize special citation came in 2006, alongside a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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