Here's the question: If jazz is America's classical music, could that mean Thelonious Sphere Monk is on the way to becoming the American Mozart?

Twenty-five years after his death, the pianist and composer with one of the most distinctive legacies in jazz has been riding a recent wave of attention.

Musicians have long played homage to him, but the release in late 2005 of a newly discovered concert recording Monk made 50 years ago with John Coltrane helped spark a Monk revival that has yet to subside. The disc has settled near the top of the Billboard jazz chart for 70 weeks or more.

Then last spring the Pulitzer Prize board awarded Monk a posthumous special citation.

"Thelonious Monk went from being the complete, unequivocal outsider to me going to pick up a Pulitzer," his son, the drummer T.S. Monk, told me last year.

Monk was perhaps not as prolific as Mozart, but he produced a string of indelible standards such as " 'Round Midnight," "Blue Monk" and "Straight, No Chaser." And he nearly patented the image of jazzman as prophet from another sphere, as it were.

Monk's music requires you to shift the musical baseline of what your mind and body respond to. It means letting in his almost radical style — the twisted syncopations, the spilled droplets of notes, the gorgeous, silent gaps that suspend you in midair for fleeting thrills.

John Coltrane, the saxophonist who began to be great while playing alongside Monk in 1957, had a similar take from a musician's perspective. He said that playing with Monk was like walking into a room with no floor so you had to figure out how to stand up on your own.

"In an era when fast, dense, virtuosic solos were the order of the day, Monk was famous for his use of space and silence," said Robin D.G. Kelley, who's working on a Monk biography.

"As a composer, Monk was less interested in writing new melodic lines over popular chord progressions than in creating a whole new architecture for his music," Kelley said by e-mail. "In the end, though, I think Monk's own description of what he was trying to do is best: 'Everything I play is different — different melody, different harmony, different structure.' "

EARLY INFLUENCE

The tree of Monk's influence, slow-growing early in his career, has spread mightily since his death on Feb. 17, 1982.

The younger Monk keeps his father's legacy alive through a Washington-based institute and a family-sponsored record label. The Thelonious Monk Institute sponsors an international competition for young players and fosters jazz education in underprivileged or underserved locations.

Monk the son is proud of the way children respond to his father's lilting, angular melodies.

"His music is remarkably digestible by any audience," he said.

It wasn't always so. Monk was born in North Carolina in 1919, but his family moved to New York. There he studied piano, played church music and then jazz in the '30s.

He first caught the ear of New York's jazz world in the early 1940s. He was present at the birth of bebop, generating new paths of rhythm, speed and harmony with the likes of the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and the drummer Kenny Clarke.

Within time, he flared away from hard-driving, fill-'er-up bebop and into his own world.

For years even fellow musicians questioned the quirky rhythms and note clusters that emanated from his piano. Others began labeling him a genius.

When the postwar 1950s spawned what might have felt like the height of the hipster-jazz ethos, Monk had to lie low and scrimp. A trumped-up drug allegation caused him to lose his cabaret license, and he couldn't play in New York clubs for six years.

LOST RECORDING

By 1957 Monk was back, and he invited Coltrane, recently fired by Miles Davis, to join him on an extended gig at the Five Spot Cafe. Just a few recordings have documented that period, but the annals of jazz have long buzzed about the quality of the music they made together.

Further confirmation arrived with the finding of that lost recording made Nov. 29, 1957, at Carnegie Hall. Monk's quartet, featuring Coltrane on tenor sax, played two sets in a Thanksgiving concert, in a lineup that also featured Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles.

The Voice of America taped the proceedings, and the recordings landed at the Library of Congress, where they sat untouched until an archivist tripped across them in 2005. The discovery was heralded as one of the great jazz finds, and Blue Note — along with the family's Thelonious Records — had a hit: "Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall."

The Thelonious label has been releasing previously unavailable material from odd and brilliant corners — live sessions in Europe, for example, some of which are packaged with DVDs.

Another interesting project is one headed by Ben Riley, a drummer who drove Monk's rhythm section in the 1960s. Riley's Monk Legacy Septet, with arrangements by Don Sickler, transforms note-for-note Monk solos into pieces for four horns, guitar, bass and drums — that's right, no piano at all. There's a scrubbed, almost formal sheen to the affair, even as the spiked melodies poke into your brain.

Monk's music wound down in the late 1960s, and he all but disappeared in 1973. He was only 64 when he died nine years later, leaving his near matchless body of work for the future. Few musicians worth hearing today fail to include Monk in their playbook.