

“Yasiin lives his life with a vibe not easily found in Hollywood, because he’s not Hollywood, point blank,” Marzan adds.

Yasiin has Thelonious’ morals and focus on what matters. It needed to be someone who understood the life and challenges of being a musician a black man in this universe. This needed to be somebody that understood Thelonious’ music on an intimate level. “When his name was brought up, there was a silence that I will never forget,” Marzan says. One of the film’s producers mentioned Bey at a development meeting. I see him as a spiritual institution.”īut finding an actor able to portray the eccentric musician would be one of the paramount decisions for the filmmakers. What sounded untrained and different stirred up something in me that I still identify with today. “At first, it was like, ‘Hmm, what is this?’ That’s all it took for me to realize this Thelonious guy was in something completely different from the others. Marzan became a Monk fan in his early twenties, hanging out at revered New York jazz club the Blue Note. They will understand the genius Thelonious was and how the world changed after him for good.” “This is not a simple story about a black jazz pianist that gets fame, does drugs, and dies. “It’s the story that today’s world needs,” Marzan says. “The adjectives.can never be a verb.The Future has already happened.And Forever.is a current event.Jupiter and team.” “A leader.A Lord.A shape in space.A man from a community of devotion who lives a simple life distant from society,” Bey says of the musician in an emailed statement to Rolling Stone. The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio System The film, the producers note, will center around “his struggles for musical success, mental illness, and the spiritual love triangle between his wife, Nellie, and one of the world’s richest women, Nica Rothschild.” Now, Jupiter Rising Film, the production company headed by Lord Moreland and Alberto Marzan, are set to begin production next summer on Thelonious, a biopic starring Yasiin Bey (f.k.a.

“There’s no greater personification of that than Thelonious.” “My entire life, I have been an artist, a person, and a thinker who seems to have an alternative view of creating, hearing, and seeing the world,” he tells Rolling Stone. Thus began a near-obsessive fascination with the jazz legend that “was already triggered by one of my favorite jazz ballads of all time: ‘Round Midnight.’”Īs his career progressed, Lord Moreland began researching the musician and started on a working script to document his life and career. Years ago, screenwriter-producer Peter Lord Moreland watched Straight No Chaser, the landmark 1988 documentary on bebop pianist-composer Thelonious Monk.
