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
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.
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.
Everyone is influenced by everybody but you bring it down home the way you feel it.
The loudest noise in the world is silence.
There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.
I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.
Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.