Thelonious Monk

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

I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

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

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

If you play a tune and a person don’t tap their feet, don’t play the tune.

One way or the other, if you want to find reasons why you shouldn’t keep on, you’ll find ’em. The obstacles are all there; there are a million of ’em.

Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.

Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.

To play without passion is inexcusable.

Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference.

Your accompanist has a lot to do with how you sing, so experiment and choose your partner wisely.

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else.

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

Man, you tell a story.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

All I play is truth and emotion.

When I heard T-Bone, I flat out lost my mind.