瑟隆尼斯．孟克：藍色孟克 Thelonious Monk / Blue Monk

"Unique, alone and solitary, Thelonious Sphere Monk, extreme pianist, pursued his career with patient obstinacy. His work, like himself, is colossal, original, bewildering and of such unusual modernity as to cause anxiety. His compositions show as much quasi-scientific rigour as chaotic urgency and, as they unfold, swing from compexity to simplicity and back again. His work has all the characteristics of the art: mystery, an arbitrary nature and clarity. Suffering and tranquil by turns, Monk played, wrote and composed to escape from hell. To do so, all he had was his piano: a fierce attack on the keyboard or, on the contrary, the gentlest caress with his fingers, a furious sound or silence. Exploring the strange, the bizarre, the second degree, this « High Priest of Bebop » symbolised the intrusion of thought into music. He displayed irony, contentiousness and the science of the unexpected and had that unique gift of expressing what is hidden behind the notes, something that he alone hears and understands."