Thelonious Monk

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

I find my inspiration in myself.

Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

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

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know

The true value of this music lies in an artist’s individual creativity and that unique process of expression which is Jazz.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

Music allows the great opportunity to play with people you love.

I’ve studied all my musical life, but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it.

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents. There must be respect for the people that have gone before.

A good player can make any instrument sound good.

Have you ever wondered why young people take to music like fish to water? Maybe it’s because music is fun, plain and simple.

I remember Glenn Miller coming to me once, before he had his own band, saying, How do you do it? How do you get started? It’s so difficult. I told him, I don’t know but whatever you do don’t stop. Just keep on going.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player