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 guess, you know, if I didn't make it with the piano, I guess I would've been the biggest bum.
The loudest noise in the world is silence.
Everyone is influenced by everybody but you bring it down home the way you feel it.
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.
There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.
All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.
The majority of juice-heads and winos and junkies arent musicians.
Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day...
A genius is the one most like himself.
I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.
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.
Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears.