"Unlike many piano players, I love Monk's playing very much. He was brought to my attention by Richard Abrams, a pianist in Chicago, and we used to analyse Monk's playing. We found that Monk's penchant for playing the piano is not in velocity, and not in dynamics, but in sound and s. He has a lot of other devices for producing the "sound"—I've noticed a lot of times, playing in clubs, where the audience is inattentive, you play something of a Monk nature and use that sonority, automatically their ears respond to it. No other piano player has done more to find out the notes that really produce sound than Monk. To completely toss him aside as a pianistic influence is an asinine view."
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Composers from the United StatesJazz musiciansPianists from the United StatesAfrican AmericansPeople from North Carolina
Original Language: English
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Sources
Jack Wilson, c. 1964, from his review of "Oska T" from '; excerpted in The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties (1966) by Leonard Feather, p. 31.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thelonious_Monk
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Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk (October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington.
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