By Colin Fleming Put a “the” in front of a name and it acquires historical heft. The Thelonious Monk who entered New York City’s WOR Studios as Halloween approached in 1947 was both man and figure. The man had lived—as he seemingly always would—several lifetimes in his recent years. The figure was an oracle of a new shift in the American musical idiom of jazz. It was about to be taken out of its orbit, regrooved for a postbop solar system. Bop, mercurial as it was, and having carronaded out of the war years, now would become something else—if not strictly replaced, then made over as only this …