Wadada Leo Smith comes to the music of Thelonious Monk from a childhood admiration of the artist. As a pre-teen he was already playing trumpet and composing and instinctively knew that Monk's ...

New York pianist Thelonious Monk spent a month in California in 1959. In Los Angeles, he played at the Hollywood Bowl, and his wife Nellie was hospitalized with gastrointestinal problems. Monk then ...

Sometime between set one and set two, Thelonious Monk and his tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse disappeared. Clearly, some industrial-strength pharmacology transpired during the intermission. Both ...

Fellow jazz fans are likely familiar with Columbia’s reissue program of the '80s and '90s. These “Columbia Jazz Masterpieces” were packaged with an ugly blue/purple border that cropped the original ...

“I think if Monk was alive, he’d be really, really annoyed with me,” pianist Jed Distler said recently. “He knew exactly how he wanted his music to sound.” “I think if Monk was alive, he’d be really, ...