In the early years, particularly at Minton's Playhouse, Monk worked with such leading jazz figures as trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie and alto-saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, as well as Charlie Christian, Joe Guy, and Nick Fenton. It was at Minton's and at the Uptown Club that Monk thus became part of the small group of musical innovators whose harmonic and rhythmic explorations spawned the angular breakaway from conventional jazz known as "bebop" or "bop." Although this episode in American jazz has become somewhat romanticized, most of the musicians involved in the events apparently did not consider that they were doing anything unusual or self-consciously creative but merely "playing a gig" for fun and money. Kenny Clarke organized the first band at Minton's Playhouse, with Monk as the pianist of the group. Monk's emergence as an accomplished jazz pianist occurred during his association with Minton's Playhouse at the Hotel Cecil on 118th Street in Harlem, where in 1940 saxophonist Henry Minton converted a run-down dining room into a jazz club that featured avant-garde improvisation and freewheeling jam sessions. During the late 1930s he played the piano with traveling evangelist shows and in brief gigs around New York City, eventually settling in 1939 with Keg Purnell's quartet. As a teenager in Harlem during the depression, Monk developed his highly personalized style of skewed melodies and oblique harmonic progressions. Johnston, Willie Smith, Jimmy Yancey, and especially Duke Ellington. One of his first jazz idols was Louis Armstrong, while major influences on his early musical development included Earl "Fatha" Hines, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, James P. Additional valuable experience was obtained when he accompanied his mother's singing at their local Baptist church in New York. Largely self-taught as a musician, Monk started his musical activities by age six, and at ten he began playing an old piano that belonged to his grandparents. His residence through most of this time was an apartment on West 63rd Street. In the early 1930s the family moved into a small apartment in Manhattan, the city where Monk spent most of the remainder of his life. When Monk was four, his mother took him and two other children to New York, while his father remained in the South. Thelonious Sphere Monk, jazz musician and composer, was born in Rocky Mount, the son of Thelonious and Barbara Batts Monk.
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