Thelonious Monk

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

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’.

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

After two takes you’re imitating yourself.

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

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

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

With the birth of the first artist, came the inevitable afterbirth… the first critic

As soon as it was understood that we could handle things in our own way, it was the thrill of my life to walk out on that stage with people just hemming the band in.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.

All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician.

Play what you know and then play above that.

A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don’t do that on stage.

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

It’s a matter of who would be right for each song. Mickey Hart for ‘All We Need is An Island’ – he’s the only guy I know who has Tahitian drums and every kind of drum on the planet.

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

My role as a drummer is as a team player to enhance what is going on around me.

This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.