Free Press. 588 pp. $30

If memory serves me correctly - and it often doesn't these days - my introduction to the jazz club scene was the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place, where Thelonious Monk often played. In musical terms, it was rather like losing your virginity to Marilyn Monroe. Which, of course, is a matter of supposition rather than memory.

Monk had become a legend by then, his records drawing adoring reviews, in demand for clubs and concerts, his odd dress and occasionally strange manner looked on as yet another manifestation of genius.

What I had no way of knowing then was how difficult the path had been for him: a painful journey through a desert of reviews depicting him as a clown or a fraud; stretches of poverty; club owners unwilling to tolerate his habitual lateness and odd behavior.

Now that path has been set out in painstaking detail by Robin D.G. Kelley in Thelonious Monk, the Life and Times of an American Original. Kelley, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California, spent 10 years on the project. He was four years into it before he persuaded Monk's son, "Toot," and other family members to cooperate with him.

Although Kelley has written on jazz before, this is a work of history rather than musicology. The organization is chronological rather than thematic, starting with Monk's birth in North Carolina in 1917 and ending with his death of a stroke, in the arms of his wife, Nellie, in 1982.

Monk the composer, Monk the pianist, and Monk the person were all legendary. It is on the third aspect that Kelley excels, sorting out the strange but often elegant dress, the cryptic manner, the persona influenced at times by drugs, bipolar disorder, and a complete impatience with cant and nonsense.

A high school dropout, he had his first job in music as a teenage pianist for a traveling evangelist. This, Kelley tells us, was probably where he picked up his trademark habit of doing a shuffle dance around the other players in his group while they were soloing.

Often depicted as a primitive, he was actually quite well versed in the classics. Seemingly detached from everything but music, he was deeply interested in the civil-rights movement and often played benefit concerts for it.

His mantra, expressed to the younger pianist Randy Weston, was "Play what you feel although it may not be the way it's supposed to be." For years, he paid the price for doing so.

His earliest records, for the Blue Note label in the late 1940s, and his first club appearances of that era often drew scathing reviews, which so enraged him that he once physically attacked the critic Leonard Feather at Rockefeller Center, grabbing the smaller man by the throat and almost tossing him onto the skating rink below.

Only when the jazz writer John S. Wilson joined the New York Times in 1952 did Monk start to gain mainstream critical acceptance.

Kelley is particularly discerning when he describes the influence on Monk's life of two women: his wife and the Baroness Nica Koenigswarter.

Nellie was a companion of enormous grace and tolerance, so alert to his needs that she refused to let him hang pictures for fear that he would hurt his hands.

The baroness, a scion of the Rothschild family and perhaps the wealthiest and most distinguished camp follower in jazz history, paid many of his mounting medical bills, and it was in her Weehawken, N.J., apartment that he spent his last years, the piano silent.