RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Thelonious Monk, whose North Carolina roots were evident in his music and his accent long after he moved to New York, will be the focus of an 18-event tribute at Duke University.

"Following Monk" opens in Durham on September 15 with the Kronos Quartet performing music commissioned by the festival, including three world premiere arrangements of "Round Midnight".

The tribute ends October 28 with a solo piano performance by Barry Harris, who lived in the same apartment with Monk during his final years. The jazz genius died at age 64 in 1982.

In between, the Following Monk Institute will offer guided tours of Monk's birthplace in Rocky Mount, and the plantation in Newton Grove where his ancestors were slaves and where his relatives still live.

Aaron Greenwald, interim director of Duke Performances, said he was searching for a project when he learned Monk was being researched by Sam Stephenson of the Center for Documentary Studies, also housed at the private university in Durham.

"We got started, and it was so much fun, we ended up building this massive festival. We just couldn't help ourselves," Greenwald said. "We realized how a) quintessential the man was as a musician and b) how he was bigger than jazz."

Although Monk spent most of his childhood in New York, after moving there at age 5 in 1922, he thought of himself as both a New Yorker and a North Carolinian, said his son, T.S. Monk, chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.

But few recall his father's start in Rocky Mount.

"I think part of the problem is there's so little serious documentation of his generation," said T.S. Monk, who lives in South Orange, N.J., and also leads his own band.

"I think that their roots were marginalized. If you look at the history of jazz, particularly the icons of jazz ... most came from either of the Carolinas, Missouri, Georgia, Alabama," he said. "I don't look at Thelonious and say he retained a lot of gospel, a lot of church in his music. I say the church never left his music."

Listeners need only replay "Well, You Needn't" with its rolling gospel rhythms, or the piano solo "Functional," with its feel of the Piedmont blues, to know that North Carolina stayed with Monk.

Or watch the Clint Eastwood documentary "Straight, No Chaser" in which Monk tries to order chicken livers and rice in a Copenhagen hotel.

That's likely due to his upbringing, even though he was raised on West 63rd Street in New York, said Stephenson, director of Duke University's Jazz Loft Project in the Center for Documentary Studies.

The project is trying to preserve recordings and photos by photographer W. Eugene Smith in a New York City apartment where major jazz musicians, including Monk, got together from 1957 to 1965.

Monk's father and mother divorced after their move to New York, and Monk rarely returned to North Carolina.

Even so, the 1930 census shows that of the 2,000 people living in the immediate vicinity of the Monks' New York household, almost 500 were born in North Carolina.

"The series asks you to ponder, what did the North Carolina of that time give us?" Stephenson said. "And one of those things was Thelonious Monk. And what an important, beautiful legacy Monk left behind."

———

On the Net:

Jazz Loft Project: http://cds.aas.duke.edu/jazzloft/index.html

Duke Performances: www.dukeperformances.org

Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz: www.monkinstitute.com