Thelonious Monk

I don’t have a definition of Jazz. You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.

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

[on Ornette Coleman] Man, that cat is nuts!

I always wanted to play the piano, and jazz appealed to me.

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

Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

You gotta mean it and you gotta treat it gentle.

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

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’.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education… just talent.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

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.

Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.

Women have not been socialized to play drums. It’s not natural for us to hit thing.

When I was coming up, I practiced all the time because I thought if I didn’t I couldn’t do my best.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

Jazz music is the real deal.