Thelonious Quotes

I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it. ~ Thelonious Monk

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

Miles'd got killed if he hit me. ~ Thelonious Monk

The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances. ~ Thelonious Monk

I'm famous. Ain't that a bitch? ~ Thelonious Monk

We have two kids, my wife and myself. ~ Thelonious Monk

Everybody in all countries tries to play jazz. ~ Thelonious Monk

There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others. ~ Thelonious Monk

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. ~ Thelonious Monk

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

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

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 can shoot pool, and I can play ping-pong. I'm pretty good at those games. ~ Thelonious Monk

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

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'd go stupid collecting and counting my money. ~ 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 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

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians. ~ Thelonious Monk

A genius is the one most like himself. ~ Thelonious Monk

They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it. ~ Thelonious Monk

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

[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

I made the wrong mistakes ~ Thelonious Monk

Jazz is my adventure. ~ Thelonious Monk

I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me. ~ Thelonious Monk

I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition. ~ Thelonious Monk

I guess, you know, if I didn't make it with the piano, I guess I would've been the biggest bum. ~ 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

I find my inspiration in myself. ~ Thelonious Monk

I played the wrong wrong notes. ~ 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

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

Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time. ~ Thelonious Monk

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

Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears. ~ Thelonious Monk

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artis ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

It's always night, or we wouldn't need light. ~ Thelonious Monk

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

The loudest noise in the world is silence. ~ Thelonious Monk

You've been making the wrong mistakes. ~ 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

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

You've got to dig it to dig it, you dig? ~ Thelonious Monk

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

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

The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good. ~ Thelonious Monk

I have tons of jazz records: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. I could go on and on. ~ Ted King

Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture. ~ Thelonious Monk

I never though much about race. ~ Thelonious Monk

Everyone is a genius at being themselves ~ Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Sphere Monk: there's not a more perfect name to fit his compositions than that name. ~ Matthew Shipp

It really was a whole generation who were listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, James Moody, Fats Navarro and, a little bit later on, Mongo Santamaría and Chuck Berry, and these dozen or so guys gave them a voice. They led the way. They wrote what a whole generation wanted to read. The time was right and they seized the day by writing about their lives. They travelled, they got into scrapes, they got arrested, they got wasted … and they wrote about it.

Isn't that something? ~ Karl Wiggins