Top 69 Thelonious Quotes
#2. There is no kind of music I don't listen to. Everything good is interesting. I am as happy with a Bach fugue as I am with a record by Thelonious Monk.
Maira Kalman
#5. Everyone is influenced by everybody but you bring it down home the way you feel it.
Thelonious Monk
#7. I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me.
Mose Allison
#8. Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.
Thelonious Monk
#9. There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.
Thelonious Monk
#13. The majority of juice-heads and winos and junkies arent musicians.
Thelonious Monk
#14. I have to listen to New York; I live there. I wasn't born there, but I've been living there all my life.
Thelonious Monk
#15. I believe, from reading biographies, that the great musicians have also been great cooks: Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach. I think I've worked out why this is - unsociable hours, plus general creativity.
Jamie Cullum
#16. The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.
Thelonious Monk
#17. Monk's reasons for dancing during a performance: "I get tired sitting down at the piano! That way I can dig the rhythm better.
Thelonious Monk
#19. 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.
Thelonious Monk
#20. Where's jazz going? I don't know. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.
Thelonious Monk
#21. No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft.
Tom Robbins
#22. The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances.
Thelonious Monk
#23. They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
Thelonious Monk
#24. I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp ... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.
Eric Clapton
#26. I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.
Thelonious Monk
#28. Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.
Thelonious Monk
#29. The first jazz pianist I heard was Thelonious Monk. My father was listening to an album of his called 'Monk's Dream' almost every day from the time I was born.
Benny Green
#30. 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.
Thelonious Monk
#32. I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.
Thelonious Monk
#34. Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy
Thelonious Monk
#35. Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.
Thelonious Monk
#37. I can shoot pool, and I can play ping-pong. I'm pretty good at those games.
Thelonious Monk
#39. In high school I was a jazz nerd, listened to a lot of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk and stuff like that. Maybe in Harry Pussy I was listening to more horn players.
Bill Orcutt
#41. He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.
Geoff Dyer
#42. If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.
Thelonious Monk
#44. I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me.
Thelonious Monk
#45. I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.
Chick Corea
#49. I guess, you know, if I didn't make it with the piano, I guess I would've been the biggest bum.
Thelonious Monk
#50. It can't be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!
Thelonious Monk
#52. When I was a kid, some of the guys would try to get me to hate white people for what they've been doing to Negroes, and for a while I tried real hard. But every time I got to hating them, some white guy would come along and mess the whole thing up.
Thelonious Monk
#56. Thelonious Sphere Monk: there's not a more perfect name to fit his compositions than that name.
Matthew Shipp
#57. Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk
John Lewis
#59. The more original something is, the more of a threat it seems until the people catch up with it. That happened with Thelonious Monk. It happened with anybody who is really original.
Steve Lacy
#60. Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears.
Thelonious Monk
#61. I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.
Thelonious Monk
#62. Anybody talented in any way - they're called eccentric.
Thelonious Monk
#64. A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
Thelonious Monk
#65. I like Thelonious Monk, he's so gnarled, he's like a piece of machinery that's pulled up the bolts on the floor and gone off on its own.
Tom Waits
#66. I have tons of jazz records: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. I could go on and on.
Ted King
#67. His name, even, is part of the marketing scheme, I mean, Thelonious Sphere Monk - how can you think of a better name to fit his style of playing?
Matthew Shipp
#68. Charles Simic, when asked what he thought of Slam Poetry events: "They are fun, but they have as much to do with poetry as Elvis Presley had to do with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk".
Charles Simic
#69. When I present the Charlie Parker book, I do a call and response that works quite well. With the Thelonious Monk book, I play the music and work with kids in a group to create a color wheel and show how the wheel can be mapped on a 12-tone chromatic scale.
Chris Raschka
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