Jazztodon artist of the week: Thelonious Monk!
"My original influences, as a musician, were piano players that I don’t even remember. Because if anybody sat down and played the piano, I would just stand there and watch ‘em all the time.I was about 19 or 20, I guess, when I started to hear my music in my mind. So I had to compose music in order to express the type of ideas that I had.
I wasn’t trying to create something that would be hard to play. I just composed music that fit with how I was thinking. I knew musicians would dig it, because it sounded good. I didn’t want to play the way I’d heard music played all my life. I got tired of hearing that. I wanted to hear something else, something better. In fact, I wanted to play differently. I had a different conception of rhythm section, and all that.”