Thelonious Sphere Monk is a unique composer and instrumentalist, a New York mind shaped and matured in the heart of the city of jazz where his family settled when he was four years old. A cosmopolitan capital like New York, on its way to becoming the center of the world, does not shape a mind in the same way as a medium-sized Midwest city. From a very young age as a jazz musician, Monk took a unique and personal path. At twenty, he was already unconventional, and in the 1940s he was dubbed the "high priest of bebop." But he had already moved on, down a road no one else knew. He had barely participated, prominently, in the development of bebop, without gaining the recognition he deserved, when he diverged to find a path that no one could identify for the obvious reason that he did not recycle the formulas developed by bebop musicians, formulas that were already in the past for him, even though bebop was still too obscure for a large majority of white jazz enthusiasts. What he wanted was to explore new territories of music. He wanted to play unique jazz, for the public, to offer them his music, but not in the comfort of a known and proven formula, but in discovery, creation, and invention. Monk was constantly searching for a new aesthetic. He is rightly considered by many jazz musicians to be the foremost among them.
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