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Monk’s mother had protected him from the rigours of life and he was dependent on and very fond of her. When they married, Nellie moved into his room to live, so that he wouldn’t have to leave his mother. They stayed in the house until 1972.When, as frequently happened, times for Monk’s music were hard, Nellie supported them by working as a seamstress She also made some of Monk’s clothes. In 1951 he was with another eccentric genius of the piano, Bud Powell, when a packet of heroin belonging to Powell was found. Monk, who didn’t use heroin, was none the less sentenced to 60 days in jail “Every day I would plead with him,” said Nellie ” ‘Thelonious, get yourself out of this trouble.

You didn’t do anything.’ ” But he’d just say ‘Nellie, I have to walk the streets when I get out. I can’t talk.’ ” His cabaret card was withdrawn by the police and for six years he was unable to play in New York night-clubs – a desperate blow to the couple’s already frugal finances.Monk’s compositions were unique in their originality. Despite his authorship of “Round Midnight”, his most famous ballad, few of his compositions surpassed the beauty of his “Crepuscule with Nellie” written for his wife while she was undergoing surgery in 1957.If it had been left to the pianist he would never have led a band of his own. Thanks to Nellie he did, and, when his quartet became a fixture, she learned the music business by necessity. She collected his fees, paid his musicians and organised the day-to-day workings of his tours.Nellie Monk took her husband’s foibles in her stride and, an intelligent woman, she became the go-between in any interviews he gave. Monk tended to respond to journalists’ questions with a glazed silence.During the Sixties Monk toured Europe seven times with his quartet and went three times to Japan. He began to make a lot of money, but his health deteriorated.

He was confined to hospital for several spells, but Nellie never left his side.In 1972, the year of Monk’s last recordings, the couple moved to New Jersey to live in a room at the house of their old friend Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter in New Jersey. From then until his death in 1982 Monk rarely left the room and hardly ever touched the baroness’s piano. In 1984 their daughter Barbara died.The 90-minute film Straight, No Chaser (1988) documented Monk’s career. Their son, Thelonious junior, became a distinguished jazz drummer and leads his own band.Steve Voce. MALCOLM POLLARD was an artist whose work was centred on Northamptonshire, but whose achievements have prompted tributes from all over the world. From the springboard of a traditional provincial and London art-school training, he launched an unconventional, enterprising and continuously experimental career that was only terminated, at 61, by a four-month battle against cancer.