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If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.
Thelonious Monk
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Thelonious Monk
Age: 64 †
Born: 1917
Born: October 10
Died: 1982
Died: February 17
Composer
Jazz Musician
Musician
Pianist
Recording Artist
Rocky Mount
North Carolina
Thelonious Sphere Monk
Thelonious S. Monk
Musical
Meaning
Freedom
Understand
Music
Really
Bops
Jazz
More quotes by Thelonious Monk
Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.
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I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.
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Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.
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Jazz is my adventure.
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I never though much about race.
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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.
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Miles'd got killed if he hit me.
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I can shoot pool, and I can play ping-pong. I'm pretty good at those games.
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A genius is the one most like himself.
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Everyone is influenced by everybody but you bring it down home the way you feel it.
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Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy
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I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.
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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.
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The majority of juice-heads and winos and junkies arent musicians.
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When I was a kid, some of the guys would try to get me to hate white people for what they've been doing to Negroes, and for a while I tried real hard. But every time I got to hating them, some white guy would come along and mess the whole thing up.
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We have two kids, my wife and myself.
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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
Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.
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
