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On Oct 10, 1917, one of the greatest composers of the 20th century was born. The late pianist wrote 70 songs during his life, many of which are standards today.  “He can’t play. He has two left hands,” was how one New York record store owner responded to Monk’s piano playing. Blue Note, however, hailed him as a genius and positioned him in the media as a mysterious maverick. Eventually leading to the most recorded jazz composition of all time, "'Round Midnight.” 

Monk had an inability to do things anyway but his way. His feeling was not to add to chords but rather strip them down, creating dissonance. In a lot of his music you hear two-note chords, he might take the third and the fifth out of a major seventh chord and play just the root and major seven. It sounds strange to some, but that's Monk in sound and person.

I remember my first experience hearing Monks music. 2 am, sweat, smoke, and mold in a Harlem basement and no one was going anywhere. It was a cover band that was on. I didn't have a phone on me to write down the name of the artist who wrote the music, but a napkin given to me by the barman fueled my obsession with one of the greatest Jazz musicians of all time.

Once Monk played 60 consecutive games of ping pong with John Coltrane, winning 59 of them. Coltrane considered Monk his mentor and as such just kept playing because that’s what Thelonious wanted to do.

Thelonious' son, T.S Monk shared this tidbit about his dad that just says it all:

“People knew he played ping pong, but he was even better at pool. He would take me to the pool hall and just run the table. Even though I was a kid, he’d never let me win.” 

Architecture: Le Corb

“The sky is radiant and for a fortnight we have been living in miraculous new conditions: a home that is heavenly, because everything is sky and light, space and simplicity.” 

In the first of a series on people we see as visionaries in their field, we turn our lens on Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, urban planner, designer, writer, painter and one of the largest influencers of modern architecture. 

Born in Switzerland in 1887, Jeanneret trained as an artist and spent his time traveling until 1917, ultimately settling in Paris. Immediately he met painter, Amedee Ozenfant, with whom he developed the concept of “Purism." Together they founded a magazine: L'Esprit Nouveau, where they published functionalist ideas in architecture and city planning. Everything he published during that time was under pseudonyms, ultimately Jeanneret stuck with “Le Corbusier,” his mother's maiden name, preferring to use his own name only for his painting. The Articles he and Ozenfnt wrote from 1917 to 1922 led to his idea of the house as "a machine for living".

"The plan is the generator."

His overall philosophy was that the house needed to function like a machine. It must function efficiently and without extraneous parts. This did not apply to his aesthetics, but purely towards practicality of use, cutting all accoutrements and unnecessary furnishings. (Emulating the efficiency of a machine) “The house needs everything necessary for healthful personal maintenance and private cultivation, but nothing materially extraneous.”  You could draw similarities with Frank Lloyd Wright in that the bedrooms in his designs were small, discouraging laziness. 

“A house is a machine for living in.  Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion.  An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on.”

A note he sent to his mother in 1934 referring to his new space: 

“The sky is radiant and for a fortnight we have been living in miraculous new conditions: a home that is heavenly, because everything is sky and light, space and simplicity.”

Le Corbusier died in 1965 while taking a long swim in the Mediterranean against his doctor's orders. Locals spotted and offered to assist the 77-year-old struggling to crawl up the rocks to get out of the water, but he declined their offers. His body later washed up on shore. 

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