Word: monke
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...took Monk only a year to discover that the pianists he really admired were not in the books?such players as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson. By the time he was 14, Monk was playing jazz at hard-times "rent parties" up in Harlem. He soon began turning up every Wednesday for amateur night at the Apollo Theater, but he won so often that he was eventually barred from the show. He was playing stride piano?a single note on the first and third beats of the bar, a chord on the second and fourth. Unable to play...
...Monk quit high school at 16 to go on tour with a divine healer?"we played and she healed." But within a year he was back in New York, playing the piano at Kelly's Stable on 52nd Street...
...street was jumping in those days, and in advance of the vogue, Monk bought a zoot suit and grew a beard; his mood, for a change, was just right for the time. The jazz world was astir under the crushing weight of swing; the big dance bands had carried off the healthiest child of Negro music and starved it of its spirit until its parents no longer recognized it. In defiant self-defense, Negro players were developing something new?"something they can't play," Monk once called it?and at 19, Monk got to the heart of things by joining...
...Sound. All the best players of the time would drop by to sit in at Minton's. Saxophonist Charlie ("Bird") Parker, Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Drummer Kenny Clarke and Guitarist Charlie Christian were all regulars and, in fitful collaboration with them, Monk presided at the birth of bop. His playing was a needling inspiration to the others. Rhythms scrambled forward at his touch; the oblique boldness of his harmonies forced the horn players into flights the likes of which had never been heard before. "The Monk runs deep," Bird would say, and with some reluctance Monk became "the High Priest...
...same year, Monk married a neighborhood girl named Nellie Smith, who had served a long and affectionate apprenticeship lighting his cigarettes and washing his dishes. Monk had always been unusually devoted to his mother; Nellie simply moved into his room so he could stay home with mom. Thus, to his intense satisfaction, he had two mothers. He still found jobs hard to come by, so Nellie went to work as a clerk to buy him clothes and cheer him up with pocket money...