Thelonious Monk Famous Quotes & Sayings
78 Thelonious Monk Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
Anybody talented in any way - they're called eccentric.— Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk: there's not a more perfect name to fit his compositions than that name.— Matthew Shipp
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.— Thelonious Monk
I got into music when I was a little boy. My dad was always into jazz. I got my education from him. The first time I listened to jazz, he gave me a Thelonious Monk record. It was so different from anything I had ever heard. It took me a while to understand it, and I liked that. I liked the fact that it wasn't immediately palatable.— Ted King
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
I find my inspiration in myself.— Thelonious Monk
Everybody in all countries tries to play jazz.— Thelonious Monk
We have two kids, my wife and myself.— Thelonious Monk
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
A genius is the one most like himself.— Thelonious Monk
I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me.— Thelonious Monk
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
I guess, you know, if I didn't make it with the piano, I guess I would've been the biggest bum.— Thelonious Monk
You've got to dig it to dig it, you dig?— Thelonious Monk
They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.— Thelonious Monk
The majority of juice-heads and winos and junkies arent musicians.— Thelonious Monk
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
Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.— Thelonious Monk
I never though much about race.— Thelonious Monk
The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.— Thelonious Monk
![Thelonious Monk Sayings By Thelonious Monk: The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/thelonious-monk-sayings-by-thelonious-monk-87378.jpg "Thelonious Monk Sayings By Thelonious Monk: The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound")
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.— Thelonious Monk
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.— Thelonious Monk
[Thelonious] Monk is a subject in itself. I mean, most piano players in most big bands sit down and they play with the band, you know. But Monk would just sit there like this. And all of a sudden there'd be a pause from all the trumpets and everything and Monk would go 'plink!' like that. And everybody would go 'Yeah!— Ray Brown
![Thelonious Monk Sayings By Ray Brown: [Thelonious] Monk is a subject in itself. I mean, most piano players in most big](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/thelonious-monk-sayings-by-ray-brown-2069623.jpg "Thelonious Monk Sayings By Ray Brown: [Thelonious] Monk is a subject in itself. I mean, most piano players in most big")
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
Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears.— Thelonious Monk
All musicians are potential band leaders.— Thelonious Monk
I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.— Thelonious Monk
I'm famous. Ain't that a bitch?— Thelonious Monk
Be-bop wasn't developed in any deliberate way.— Thelonious Monk
Jazz is my adventure.— Thelonious Monk
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
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
All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.— Thelonious Monk
I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.— Thelonious Monk
If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.— Thelonious Monk
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
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
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
![Thelonious Monk Sayings By Geoff Dyer: He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/thelonious-monk-sayings-by-geoff-dyer-555015.jpg "Thelonious Monk Sayings By Geoff Dyer: He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though")
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
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
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
I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.— Thelonious Monk
The piano ain't got no wrong notes.— Thelonious Monk
Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy— Thelonious Monk
Everyone is influenced by everybody but you bring it down home the way you feel it.— Thelonious Monk
At first I didn't understand what [Thelonious Monk] was doing, but I went back again, and what I can say about Monk is that I heard ancient Africa in his music. When he played, it was like a ballet. He captured the sound of the universe. Monk could take a triad, a simple chord, and make it sound dissonant. I'm sure that element he had in his piano was part of the two years he spent traveling with his mother in gospel music in the tent shows.— Randy Weston
![Thelonious Monk Sayings By Randy Weston: At first I didn't understand what [Thelonious Monk] was doing, but I went back again,](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/thelonious-monk-sayings-by-randy-weston-804671.jpg "Thelonious Monk Sayings By Randy Weston: At first I didn't understand what [Thelonious Monk] was doing, but I went back again,")
Miles'd got killed if he hit me.— Thelonious Monk
The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances.— Thelonious Monk
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
A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.— Thelonious Monk
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
I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day ...— Thelonious Monk
The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o'clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus years non stop, just get up out of his sick bed, crawl up on the bandstand and play, the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all of these people give their lives for this, and they did give their lives, is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there's just nothing else you're going to taste that's as sweet.— Wynton Marsalis
I always believed in being myself.— Thelonious Monk
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
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
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
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
I made the wrong mistakes— Thelonious Monk
The loudest noise in the world is silence.— Thelonious Monk
There was a lot that was tricky about playing with [Thelonious Monk]. It's a musical language where there's really no lyrics. It's something you feel and you're hearing. It's like an ongoing conversation. You really had to listen to this guy. Cause he could play the strangest tempos, and they could be very in-between tempos on some of those compositions. You really had to listen to his arrangements and the way he would play them. On his solos, you'd really have to listen good in there. You'd have to concentrate on what you were doing as well.— Roy Haynes
![Thelonious Monk Sayings By Roy Haynes: There was a lot that was tricky about playing with [Thelonious Monk]. It's a musical](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/thelonious-monk-sayings-by-roy-haynes-1580187.jpg "Thelonious Monk Sayings By Roy Haynes: There was a lot that was tricky about playing with [Thelonious Monk]. It's a musical")
I can shoot pool, and I can play ping-pong. I'm pretty good at those games.— Thelonious Monk
After two takes you're imitating yourself.— Thelonious Monk
There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.— Thelonious Monk
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
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
I'd go stupid collecting and counting my money.— Thelonious Monk
Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.— Thelonious Monk
![Thelonious Monk Sayings By Thelonious Monk: Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/thelonious-monk-sayings-by-thelonious-monk-1816579.jpg "Thelonious Monk Sayings By Thelonious Monk: Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.")
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
Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop.— Jack Kerouac
Jazz music and, more specifically, jazz musicians, are my artistic heroes. I want to be the Thelonious Monk of acting. He had no concern for how well he was received. He played whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. He just wasn't interested in achieving the good opinion of his audience. That's the Holy Grail of acting; of any art form.— Trevor St. John
You've been making the wrong mistakes.— Thelonious Monk
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
I have tons of jazz records: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. I could go on and on.— Ted King
I played the wrong wrong notes.— Thelonious Monk
It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.— Thelonious Monk
Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.— Thelonious Monk
Everyone is a genius at being themselves— Thelonious Monk
