Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer, born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and raised in Manhattan from 1922. As house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem in the 1940s he helped shape bebop. He wrote many of the standards of modern jazz, among them "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser" and "Ruby, My Dear", and he is counted as the second most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington. Monk made his first recordings in 1944 with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet and his first records as a leader for Blue Note from 1947.