Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monkwas an American jazz pianist and composer. Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser" "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed more than 1,000 pieces, whereas Monk wrote about 70...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPianist
Date of Birth10 October 1917
CityRocky Mount, NC
CountryUnited States of America
Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.
I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself.
Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears.
At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.
I have to listen to New York; I live there. I wasn't born there, but I've been living there all my life.
The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances.
I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.
A genius is the one most like himself.
Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by... What you don't play can be more important than what you do.
I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day...
The majority of juice-heads and winos and junkies arent musicians.
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.
Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.