Thelonious Monk

Not one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign. Fire and air take four each with two in water, and six of the ten are fixed with a single mutable. The Moon, Mars, Saturn and Neptune fill eleven degrees of Leo. The record says Monk wrote Round Midnight and played with a sense of space and dissonance that took the rest of jazz twenty years to catch up with, and that he stopped performing entirely for the last six years of his life.

Four planets inside eleven degrees of Leo is the structure here, and the pair at the centre of it is the Moon conjunct Mars at under a third of a degree, which reads as emotion acting immediately: protectiveness, courage on behalf of other people, and a temper that arrives and departs faster than anybody else has adjusted to it. The Sun sits sixty degrees from both, at under a third from Mars and under two thirds from the Moon, so identity, need and drive are tied together three ways.

No earth at all, in a pianist, is the count that cuts against all of that. Earth is the element of what gets made and kept, and a chart without any belongs to somebody for whom the made object is not the point, which in a musician the record credits with a sense of space is either a very neat fit or a sentence a reader should distrust. It is the second one. Space in a piece of music is a decision about timing, and timing is not an element.

The record's last fact is that he stopped performing for the last six years of his life, and it offers no reason. Nothing in this chart supplies one either, and the honest thing is to repeat the sentence and leave the six years alone. Mercury sits on the first degree of Libra, and Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. He died at Englewood on 17 February 1982, at sixty four. One contact came inside half a degree that day, the transiting Sun square his natal Venus at under a fifth. The Moon was at its last quarter and thirty three per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.