Thelonious Monk

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

If my own work had more importance than any others, it’s because the piano is the key instrument in music.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

I remember going to sleep many nights with a Gibson catalog, dreaming about getting a Les Paul. I finally did, with a loan from my Dad. It’s a really heavy instrument. But it plays like butter. I met Les backstage at a show once. Jeff Beck made me play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ for Les, which was a little embarrassing. He changed history, big-time.

All that I’ve played, all that I’ve sung, I couldn’t have done any other way.

Look for the one who’s not smiling and play to that person. Once you’ve got that person, you’ve got the whole club.

Musicianship is using your two ears.

I am inclined to just write music and not worry about what people can or can’t do.

Only play what you hear. If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

Learn the tunes by playing the masters, learn expression by playing yourself.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.

It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not, it’s feeling.

I think music needs to be of its time and speak to that time.