Straight, No Chaser

"Musicians—particularly jazz musicians of Monk’s period, and most especially Monk, taciturn and gnomic in utterance by nature—tend not, as writers do, to write hundreds of letters sharing with intimates what is going on in their hearts or heads. A biography of Monk, perforce, has to rely on the not always reliable, often conflicting, memories of others. Instinct is involved, surely as much as perspicacity, in sifting through the mass of observation and anecdote. The Monk family appears to have shared private material with Kelley that had hitherto been unavailable. This trust was not misplaced."

In The New York Times, August Kleinzahler reviews Robin D. G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.