Thelonious Monk was the subject of an NPR interview in which Biographer Robin D.G. Kelley tries to clear the air about his favorite subject.
"Monk's story challenges a very tired idea of the tortured artist ... committed to making an art by any means necessary," Kelley says.
Kelley teaches history and American studies at the University of Southern California. He says Monk wanted people to enjoy his music — and purchase it, too.
"He was someone who thought of music as a vocation: to keep his family afloat; his wife, Nellie; his two kids," Kelley says. "And so he took his work seriously."
Sometimes thought of as an offbeat composer, Thelonious Monk, who died more than 25 years ago, is well respected today and his music is still played and heard around the world.
But in his new book, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Kelley tackles those myths about Monk being a loner and difficult. He argues that Monk was not an isolated genius but was connected to his New York City community, and he played benefits for the social causes of the day.
"Well, I always did want to play the piano — the first piano I saw, I tried to play it," Monk said on a 1963 public television broadcast on New York's Channel 13. "I learned how to read before I took lessons, you know, watching my sister practice her lessons over her shoulder."
That recording is but one of Kelley's discoveries over the 14 years he spent researching his book. In scouring roughly 300 interviews, he says he learned that Monk may have started reading music when he was 10. By the time he was 11, he began studying with a classically trained pianist named Simon Wolf.
"The kinds of eay beginner piano lessons he gave Thelonious came out of the books of Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff," Kelley says. "These were the composers Monk was drawn to; Bach, Beethoven to a lesser degree."
So, even a genius like Thelonius Monk had to start somewhere.
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