BEN RATLIFF ESSAY

Let’s say goodbye forever to an old jazz myth: Thelonious Monk as inexplicable mad genius.

Robin D. G. Kelley’s biography, “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original,” just published by Free Press, is an omnibus of myth-busting. It holds the largest amount of helpful, uncaricatured information about Monk in one place and goes a long way to correct a reductive understanding of Monk as a person, if not necessarily Monk as an artist, that has persisted for more than 60 years.

In 1947 , Down Beat magazine suggested that Monk-then 29-was “the George Washington of be-bop,” although “few have ever seen him.”

Monk’s records didn’t sell well immediately, but the myth of his aloofness and eccentricity did. Mr. Kelley asserts that the “mystery” reputation became almost a professional liability. (In the late 1940s-while making some of the greatest recordings in all of jazz-he and his wife were destitute.)

Monk sometimes tried to dispel the myth in interviews, but ultimately lost interest.

Nobody faults Monk for his musicianship anymore, and his harmonic language has been fully absorbed into jazz’s mainstream. But there are still questions. Why did his music sound that way, somewhere between stride-piano- fulsome and bebop-jagged-Why did his creative output fall off in the 1960s, with so many indifferent performances?

What was the nature of his relationship with Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, or Nica, his friend and occasional patron from 1954 until his death in 1982? And what exactly was his psychological condition?

Mr. Kelley, 47, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California, has a list of refutations to make.

“The main ones,” he said, “are that Monk was disengaged and unaware of his surroundings. I argue that he was incredibly engaged with his family, friends and music; he was in the business.

Two, that he and Nica had anything but a platonic relationship. I argue that he wasn’t as dependent on her as it seemed. Three, that descriptions of him as childlike and taciturn were completely wrong.”

Mr. Kelley sharpened his understanding of Monk’s bipolar disorder through interviews with relatives and a psychiatrist. But he sought to combat the perception “that Monk was an ‘artiste,’ a reclusive personality.” “He wanted to get a hit,” Mr. Kelley continued.

“He wanted to make money. It wasn’t about fame; it was about a working musician who believes that you could take a pure piece of music and get people to buy it.”

A new book aims to dispel myths about Thelonious Monk’s reclusiveness. / EDDIE LOCKE