This month we celebrate the birthday of one of the truly unique personalities in jazz: Thelonious Monk. Born on October 10, 1917, Monk created a style of improvisation and a repertoire of compositions ...

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a reissue of The Complete Riverside Recordings of pianist Thelonious Monk. He says it's really the story of two men: Monk and late record producer Orrin Keepnews.

Thelonious Monk and I were in the same room at the same time just once, in the summer of 1968, at the Winston-Salem, North Carolina Coliseum, the first stop on a 21-city tour for a package show of ...

There is a beneficent heat wave of attention returning to the subject of Thelonious Monk. It helps us through the blizzard of fluff perpetually focused on the cheap, the superficial, the vulgar, and ...

The greatest lost concert in American history almost never happened at all. It was Oct. 27, 1968, in Palo Alto, California. Outside of his high school, Danny Scher, a 16-year-old, bushy-haired, ...

One of my favorite Thelonious Monk sessions took place on May 30, 1952, his last for Blue Note Records. There's a slippery urgency to the pianist's playing on this date, and the sidemen are both ...

Thelonious Monk, the incomparably influential jazz composer and pianist, would have turned 100 today, and across the country a healthy range of commemorative tributes is already underway. But the ...

Sorry, Denzel. Yasiin Bey, the artist formerly known as Mos Def, has been cast as jazz musician Thelonious Monk in an upcoming film by screenwriter-producer Peter ...

Earlier today, the Los Angeles–based production company Jupiter Rising Film announced that Yasiin Bey would portray Thelonious Monk in a biopic about the late jazz legend. The co-founders of Jupiter ...

Yasiin Bey has stepped back from his role portraying Thelonious Monk in an upcoming biopic after the jazz legend’s estate issued a statement to “condemn” the unauthorized film. However, just hours ...

Thelonious Sphere Monk is one of the true great jazz originals. As Minton's house pianist, Monk was entrenched as THE bebop pianist: At Minton's, with Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Kenny Clarke, and ...