Featured Links
Wynton Marsalis & Willie Nelson Play the Music of Ray Charles DVD
http://www.history.com/dvd/wynton-marsalis/
Ronald Jenkees Quotes
"I like jamming to weird stuff, but ya'll probably know that already." - Ronald Jenkees
Wynton Marsalis Quotes
"Because of (early Jazz writers) lack of understanding of the mechanics of music, they thought there weren't any mechanics. It was the "they all can sing, they all have rhythm" syndrome. If that was the case, why was there only one Louis Armstrong?" - Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis Quotes
"Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires." - Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis Quotes
"How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense." - Wynton Marsalis
Woody Shaw Quotes
"The trouble with this country is that everything is new. We don't have any consideration for the past... Just because something is old, you don't just rip it down. You can renovate it instead of ripping it down and building something new." - Woody Shaw
Wes Montgomery Quotes
"Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going." - Wes Montgomery
Tony Bennett Quotes
"I think one of the reasons I'm popular again is because I'm wearing a tie. You have to be different." - Tony Bennett Quotes
Tommy Smith Quotes
"The saxophone's sonic possibilities are limitless, like an aural kaleidoscope. Its sound inspires sensuality but it but can rock out and scream with anger and frustration." - Tommy Smith
Tommy Smith Quotes
"The golden curves and gorgeous sound of the saxophone have blown throughout the world like a beautiful breeze, inspiring many to study its charms." - Tommy Smith
Sun Ra Quotes
"Where human eyes have never seen, where human beings have never been, I build a world of abstract dreams, and I wait for you." - Sun Ra
Sun Ra Quotes
"The world thinks that music is a commercial commodity. I'm glad that is not my code." - Sun Ra
Stan Kenton Quotes
"When you get to the top, don't forget to send the elevator down for the next guy." - Stan Kenton
Stan Getz Quotes
"A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas." - Stan Getz
Stan Getz Quotes
"The value of Jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul." - Stan Getz
Sonny Rollins Quotes
"Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it's going to be difficult to get them across unless you have (a) a distinctive sound or (b) a loud sound. These are musts." - Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins Quotes
"One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really." - Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins Quotes
"I'm fortunate that I'm making a living at it now because I'm not equipped to do anything else." - Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins Quotes
"Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz." - Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins Quotes
"I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress...so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair." - Sonny Rollins
Sonny Criss Quotes
"I don't separate one era of jazz from another, because I listen to everybody. Everybody takes from everybody else and adds their own thing and goes on from there." - Sonny Criss
Shorty Rogers Quotes
"When Bird came on the scene, it was just as shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark, and then the light appeared for the first time." - Shorty Rogers
Ronnie Scott Quotes
"Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible." - Ronnie Scott
Quincy Jones Quotes
"Hell, nobody knows where Jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody." - Quincy Jones
Peter Gordon Quotes
"The problem with jazz is that it is hidden in plain sight." - Peter Gordon, Thirsty Ear Records.
Paul Desmond Quotes
"The qualities in music which I considered most important -- and still do -- were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity." - Paul Desmond
Pat Metheny Quotes
"To me, if it's anything, Jazz is a verb - it's more like a process than it is a thing." - Pat Metheny
Ornette Coleman Quotes
"It's the hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: you feel this, you play this." - Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman Quotes
"The idea is more important than the style or the contents of the style you're trying to play in." - Ornette Coleman
Nat Adderley Quotes
"I never heard of a jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so what are you going to do? Play for the walls?" - Nat Adderley
Miles Davis Quotes
"You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival." - Miles Davis
Max Roach Quotes
"Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers." - Max Roach
Mary Lou Williams Quotes
"I wonder what an agent would do if he had to travel with the band he's booking." - Mary Lou Williams
Ludwin Von Beethoven Quotes
"Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth." - Ludwin Von Beethoven
Les Paul Quotes
"As a guitarist Charlie [Parker] was simply the best around...he had a way of getting on one note and driving it right into the ground." - Les Paul
Lennie Tristano Quotes
"The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen." - Lennie Tristano
Lee Morgan Quotes
"There are no natural barriers. It's all music. It's either hip or it ain't." - Lee Morgan
Kurt Elling Quotes
"[Jazz singing] is like pornography. You can't say what it is, but you know it when you see it." — Kurt Elling
Joshua Redman Quotes
"If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn't be playing anything of depth." - Joshua Redman
Josephine Baker Quotes
"Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone." - Josephine Baker
Jon Hendricks Quotes
"Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents, there must be respect for the people that have gone before." - Jon Hendricks
John Coltrane Quotes
"Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad." - John Coltrane
John Coltrane Quotes
"I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once." - John Coltrane
Joe Venuti Quotes
"If you're going to make a mistake, make it loud so everybody else sounds wrong." - Joe Venuti
Jo Jones Quotes
"The hardest thing for a musician to learn is how to play WITH people. That's what made the Basie rhythm section." - Jo Jones
Jaco Pastorius Quotes
"I'm not here to raise hippie consciousness, I'm here to wet some panties." - Jaco Pastorius
Horace Silver Quotes
"We all have to open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to try and arrive at something new and different." - Horace Silver
Hoagy Charmichael Quotes
"Traveling with a big band is like being an inmate in a traveling zoo." - Hoagy Charmichael
Gerry Mulligan Quotes
"Life on the road is murder. It's as though life begins and ends when you have your horn in your mouth." - Gerry Mulligan
Gerald Early Quotes
"I think there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. They're the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced." - Gerald Early, Historian.
George Shearing Quotes
"When people ask me how is it I was a musician, I facetiously say that I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and in a previous life I was Johann Sebastian Bach's guide dog." - George Shearing
George Russell Quotes
"I don't just write music to esthetically satisfy somebody. The reason I write music is that I feel it's a vehicle or channel which leads to your true self, your essence." - George Russell
George Russell Quotes
"If America has a future, Jazz has a future. The two are inseparable." - George Russell
George Carlin Quotes
"Jazz musicians are the only workers I can think of who are willing to put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free." - George Carlin (regarding jam sessions)
Gary Bartz Quotes
"Music is my religion. Music is the only thing that has never failed me. People let you down, music won't." — Gary Bartz
Elvin Jones Quotes
"I feel very, very gratified when people are complimentary to what I have done or appreciated it with sincerity... It makes me feel that maybe I did do something that was proper and that was right." - Elvin Jones
Eddie Condon Quotes
"As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass, or does it come in like honey?" - Eddie Condon
Ed Thigpen Quotes
"Musicians should never forget that we're blessed. We have a special gift that people can enjoy through us. We've had the good fortune to receive this and pass it along to others." - Ed Thigpen
Earl Hines Quotes
"You may have holes in your shoes, but don't let the people out front know it. Shine the tops." - Earl Hines
Duke Ellington Quotes
"It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line." - Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Quotes
"Roaming through the jungle of "Ohs" and "Ahs" searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats." - Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Quotes
"Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion." - Duke Ellington
Buddy Rich Quotes
"Well, I never really practiced because I never had the opportunity to practice." - Buddy Rich
Cornel West Quotes
"Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent." - Cornel West
Don Ferrara Quotes
"Every note Roy [Eldridge] played had meaning and life... his feelings pushed the valves down, not his fingers." - Don Ferrara
Don Cherry Quotes
"The day I met Ornette [Coleman], it was about 90 degrees and he had on an overcoat. I was scared of him." - Don Cherry
Decca Records Quotes
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." - Decca Records (in response to The Beatles, 1962)
Dave Brubeck Quotes
"Damn it, when I'm bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic - take it or leave it." - Dave Brubeck
Charlie Parker Quotes
"I'm very glad to have met you. I like your playing very much." - Charlie Parker (to Jean-Paul Sartre)
Charlie Haden Quotes
"In the midst of creating, a person is raised to another level of consciousness that doesn't have that much to do with everyday thinking. It's as if you could imagine life before there were words." - Charlie Haden
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Thelonius Monk went over to Bird and Bud Powell and said, 'I told you guys to act crazy, but I didn't tell you to fall in love with the act. You're really crazy now.'" - Charles Mingus
Cannonball Adderley Quotes
"Hipness is not a state of mind, It's a fact of life!" - Cannonball Adderley
Booker Little Quotes
"My own feelings about the direction in which jazz should go are that there should be much less stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content, on what might be termed humanity in music and the freedom to say all that you want." - Booker Little
Billy Taylor Quotes
"The thing that is making jazz healthy today is that people are coming out of other backgrounds - from rock, folk, from ethnic music. It's changing the music, and for the better." - Billy Taylor
Billy Martin Quotes
"There is Jazz in our [Medeski, Martin & Wood's] music but there is a Funk element too. People have labeled us organic acid Jazz but we aren't too keen on that. I prefer Sanford and Sun Ra!" - Billy Martin
Benny Green Quotes
"Anyone can learn what Louis Armstrong knows about music in a few weeks. Nobody could learn to play like him in a thousand years." - Benny Green
Ben Sidran Quotes
"If Charlie Parker were alive today, somebody would try to cut a disco single with and try and get him to sell three million." - Ben Sidran
Bart Simpson Quotes
"Ahhh... cartoons. America's only native art form. I don't count Jazz because it sucks." - Bart Simpson
Aldous Huxley Quotes
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible, is music." - Aldous Huxley
Allan Jaffe Quotes
"New Orleans is the only place I know of where you ask a little kid what he wants to be and instead of saying 'I want to be a policeman,' or 'I want to be a fireman,' he says, 'I want to be a musician.'" — Allan Jaffe
Ahmad Alaadeen Quotes
"Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world." - Ahmad Alaadeen
Wynton Marsalis Quotes
"But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play." - Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis Quotes
"Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed." - Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis Quotes
"Some stances are just conducive to swinging. If I stand up straight for too long it's harder to swing. Plus my feet hurt." - Wynton Marsalis
Wes Montgomery Quotes
"I never practice my guitar... from time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat." - Wes Montgomery
Wayne Shorter Quotes
"A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?" - Wayne Shorter
Wayne Shorter Quotes
"I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!" - Wayne Shorter
Tom Harrell Quotes
"I try to listen attentively to musical sounds around me. You can think of the sounds of daily life as being musical. So I try to absorb the intricacies of the sounds as I would if I were listening to a piece of music. I try to see the beauty in everything." - Tom Harrell
Thelonious Monk Quotes
"At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand." - Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk Quotes
"I don't conside myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself." - Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk Quotes
"I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you're tired, that's all there is to it." - Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk Quotes
"Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears." - Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk Quotes
"Where's jazz going? I don't know? Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens." - Thelonious Monk
Teddy Wilson Quotes
"I don't want to sound immodest, but what musicians like myself play is Ph.D. music compared to the nursery-school sounds of a lot of rock and roll. They've got to grow out of it. You can only maintain that stance so long - unless, in musical terms, you're retarded." - Teddy Wilson
Sun Ra Quotes
"So rise lightly from the earth and try your wings. Try them now while the darkness is invisible." - Sun Ra
Steve Lacy Quotes
"In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds." - Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy Quotes
"A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow." - Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy Quotes
"Let's call it spirit, because to me, there is spirit in a reed. It's a living thing, a reed, really, and it does contain spirit of a sort. And they say these areas make sound when the wind comes. It's really an ancient vibration." - Steve Lacy
Sonny Rollins Quotes
"...this is my dilemma. I'm a guy who makes things up as I go along, so nothing is ever finished - there are so many layers. So when you solo, yeah, you might get into one thing, but then, hey, everything has implications! You can hear the next level. And that's how I feel about improvising - there's always another level." - Sonny Rollins
Roland Kirk Quotes
"When I die, I want them to play the BLACK AND CRAZY BLUES, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it." - Roland Kirk
Roland Kirk Quotes
"I wish we could just stay on the bandstand, it's so peaceful up here." - Roland Kirk
Roland Kirk Quotes
"So until we see you again, bright moments and keep searchin' for your mystery note on the universal piano of life." - Roland Kirk
Pepper Adams Quotes
"No baritone player should be afraid of the noise it makes. Harry Carney isn't!" - Pepper Adams
Pepper Adams Quotes
"I'm all in favor of getting grants for musicians. Or any other good brand of Scotch." - Pepper Adams
Paul Desmond Quotes
"I discovered early in life that if you take gym first period, you can go into the wrestling room and sit in the corner and sleep." - Paul Desmond
Paul Desmond Quotes
"Our basic audience begins with creaking elderly types of twenty-three and above." - Paul Desmond
Paul Desmond Quotes
"We're working as if it we're going out of style — which of course it is." - Paul Desmond
Paul Desmond Quotes
"I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast." - Paul Desmond
Paul Desmond Quotes
"I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player, as well as a special award in 1961 for quietness." - Paul Desmond
Oscar Moore Quotes
"To me, playing guitar is like talking to a girl. You just kind of know how to do it." - Oscar Moore
Ornette Coleman Quotes
"We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music from life." - Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman Quotes
"Musicians tell me, if what I'm doing is right, they should never have gone to school." - Ornette Coleman
Miles Davis Quotes
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks too Duke Ellington." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"I really liked Wynton [Marsalis] when I first met him. He's still a nice young man, only confused." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"I never thought that the music called 'Jazz' was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That's a little bit too much." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"Keith [Jarrett] played so nice I had to give him two pianos. I'd say 'Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?'" - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"Those songs to me don't exist, you know? 'So What' or 'Kind of Blue', I'm not going to play that shit, those things are there. They were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It's over; it's on the record." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"I don't care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"Monk was a gentle person, gentle and beautiful, but he was strong as an ox. And if I had ever said something about punching Monk out in front of his face - and I never did - then somebody should have just come and got me and taken me to the madhouse, because Monk could have just picked my little ass up and thrown me through a wall." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"I don't like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there's no music but Bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"You can't play nothing on modern trumpet that doesn't come from him, not even modern shit. I can't even remember a time when he sounded bad playing the trumpet. Never. Not even one time. He had great feeling up in his playing and he always played on the beat. I just loved the way he played and sang." - Miles Davis (on Louis Armstrong)
Louis Armstrong Quotes
"Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz." - Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong Quotes
"If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it." - Louis Armstrong
Lester Young Quotes
"Originality's the thing. You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality you ain't really nowhere. Gotta be original." - Lester Young
Lester Young Quotes
"The trouble with most musicians today is that they are copycats. Of course you have to start out playing like someone else. You have a model, or a teacher, and you learn all that he can show you. But then you start playing for yourself. Show them that you're an individual. And I can count those who are doing that today on the fingers of one hand." - Lester Young
Keith Jarrett Quotes
"I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it." - Keith Jarrett
Keith Jarrett Quotes
"Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple." - Keith Jarrett
Keith Jarrett Quotes
"I've never heard anything Wynton [Marsalis] played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me... he's jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty." - Keith Jarrett
Johnny Griffin Quotes
"Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions." - Johnny Griffin
John McNeil Quotes
"If a [trumpet] player is operating at the far frontiers of his or her ability, pushing the envelope so to speak, it seems to me that a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Maybe even desirable." - John McNeil
John Coltrane Quotes
"My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being … When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups … I want to speak to their souls." - John Coltrane
John Coltrane Quotes
"Sometimes I'd think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass." - John Coltrane
Jay McShann Quotes
"They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I've heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn't swinging." - Jay McShann
Jaco Pastorius Quotes
"A chimpanzee could learn to do what I do physically. But it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life." - Jaco Pastorius
Jaco Pastorius Quotes
"I'm not a star. I'll never be a Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley or a Ray Charles. I'm just an imitator, man. I'm doing a very bad imitation on the bass of Jerry Jemmott, Bernard Odum, Jimmy Fielder, Jimmy Blanton, Igor Stravinsky, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, James Brown, Charlie Parker... the cats, man. I'm just backing up the cats." - Jaco Pastorius
Horace Silver Quotes
"Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate upon it in order to get the most of it. You must absorb most of it. The harmonies within the music can relax, soothe, relax, and uplift the mind when you concentrate upon and absorb it. Jazz music stimulates the minds and uplifts the souls of those who play it was well as of those who listen to immerse themselves in it. As the mind is stimulated and the soul uplifted, this is eventually reflected in the body." - Horace Silver
Herbie Hancock Quotes
"Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity." - Herbie Hancock
Herbie Hancock Quotes
"A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He’s above all a human being - the true artform is being a human being." - Herbie Hancock
Herbie Hancock Quotes
"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
Gerry Mulligan Quotes
"What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on."
Eric Dolphy Quotes
"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air, you can never capture it again." - Eric Dolphy
Elvin Jones Quotes
"You've got to want to die for the motherfucker!" - Elvin Jones (when asked how he and Coltrane's group managed to play together with such intensity.)
Elvin Jones Quotes
"If there's any such thing as a perfect man, I think John Coltrane was one. And I think that kind of perfection has to come from a greater force than there is here on earth." - Elvin Jones
Ellis Marsalis Quotes
"At a time when individualism is becoming an endangered species, jazz represents a celebration of the individual." - Ellis Marsalis
Featured Links
Ella Fitzgerald : A Twentieth-Century Life (Hardcover)
http://www.history.com/books/ella-fitzgerald-life/
Ella Fitzgerald & Duke Ellington: The Last Jam Session DVD
http://www.history.com/dvd/ella-fitzgerland-duke/
Ella Fitzgerald Quotes
"I've had some wonderful love affairs and some that didn't work out. I don't want to dwell on that and I don't want to put people down, but I think all the fabulous places I've been, the wonderful things that have happened for me, the great people I've met - that ought to make a story." - Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald Quotes
"Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong." - Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald Quotes
"Once, when we were playing at the Apollo, [Billie] Holiday was working a block away at the Harlem Opera House. Some of us went over between shows to catch her, and afterwards we went backstage. I did something then, and I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do - I asked her for her autograph." - Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald Quotes
"I know I'm no glamour girl, and it's not easy for me to get up in front of a crowd of people. It used to bother me a lot, but now I've got it figured out that God gave me this talent to use, so I just stand there and sing." - Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald Quotes
"Forgive me if I don't have the words. Maybe I can sing it and you'll understand." - Ella Fitzgerald
Eddie Harris Quotes
"Reimbursement may be sometimes small, but then great ability can never be measured by the tickets at the gate." - Eddie Harris
Eddie Condon Quotes
"This all came of a conversation I had with [John] Steinbeck once when we were standing in a men’s room somewhere. Steinbeck asked me why I didn’t play the banjo any more and I told him that went out with the high-button shoes." - Eddie Condon
Eddie Condon Quotes
"[Dave] Brubeck, for instance, is not careless. He's a studied guy. And even if his picture ends up on the back cover of Life, he's still a studious guy.
Eddie Condon Quotes
"Ted Lewis could make the clarinet talk. What it said was 'Put me back in the case!'" - Eddie Condon
Eddie Condon Quotes
"Finally, Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet. He put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying 'Yes!'" - Eddie Condon
Duke Ellington Quotes
"There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have too have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is too pay them money!" - Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Quotes
"I don't believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A., you are referring to categories again." - Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Quotes
"Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven't; there’s no proof of it."
Duke Ellington Quotes
"Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... in its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, Jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that man people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country." - Duke Ellington Quotes
Duke Ellington Quotes
"Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one." - Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Quotes
"I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right."
Dizzy Gillespie Quotes
"Miles got a mysticque about him — plus he's at the top of his profession. And he's got way, way, way more money." - Dizzy Gillespie
Dave Kikoski Quotes
"For me, the main thing is spontaneity and taking chances. You have to study and know the traditions, but then you have to play things that haven't been played before. It becomes a balance of knowing the tradition and using your own original voice to add to it." - Dave Kikoski Quotes
Dave Kikoski Quotes
"The hardest thing about being a young musician on the jazz scene is that there are so many styles of music, jazz and otherwise, that you're exposed to. The challenge is to use all that in your own way, to personalize all that has come before you and all that is happening around you. To get the music the way you want it, there's a lot of work involved." - Dave Kikoski
Dave Liebman Quotes
"Art is constant tension and release. That is where artists live, between the two, or at times, submerged in either. The challenge is never ending perfection is impossible, it could always be different, better, or worse. It's not important, just process and striving to be like the man who walks the trapeze maintaining balance." - Dave Liebman
Clark Terry Quotes
"Well, I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gon' keep playin’!" - Clark Terry
Chet Baker Quotes
"Well, if I could play like Wynton [Marsalis], I wouldn’t play like Wynton." - Chet Baker
Charlie Parker Quotes
"When I first heard music, I thought it should be very clean, very precise. Something that people could understand, something that was beautiful." - Charlie Parker
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don’t care what you play anyway." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Good jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms, and yells. Fine jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"That sound in tune to you? Sounds sharp to me. Sounds like I'm playing sharp all the time. My singing teacher told us you should do that. Maybe I got it from her. She said singers when they grow old have a tendency to go flat. So if you sing sharp as a young person, as you get older and go flat, you'll be in tune. In other words, it's never thought good to be flat. It means you can't get to the tone." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
It [jazz] isn't like it used to be. The guys aren't together. They're all separated. Individuals now. Bird was a symbol. It was a clique, a clique of people. Who all believed in one thing: gettin' high. And playin'." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!" - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. Maybe they wouldn't have been as good because when people are born free – I can't imagine it, but I've got a feeling that if it's so easy for you, the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker’s next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?" - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Tastes are created by the business interests. How else can you explain the popularity of Al Hirt?" - Charles Mingus
Cecil Taylor Quotes
"Where are you Bud? ... Lightning ... now a lone rain falling thru doors empty of room-Jazz Naked Fire Gesture, Dancing protoplasm Absorbs." - Cecil Taylor
Branford Marsalis Quotes
"You know, being America, being the land of “number ones", everyone wants to be a leader before they follow." - Branford Marsalis
Brad Mehldau Quotes
"The very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid." - Brad Mehldau
Sam Woodyard Quotes
"There's no sense in your building a house and my building a garage for it if we're not on the same property." - Sam Woodyard
Mary Lou Williams Quotes
"During the years I was with Andy Kirk we starved almost. I remember not eating for practically a month several times. But we were very, very happy because the music was so interesting, and you forgot to eat, anyway." - Mary Lou Williams
Joe Williams Quotes
"I think that musicians should never forget about the intimacy of bringing two people together, and the aesthetic transference where you're almost vicariously involved in a romance between other people." - Joe Williams
Joe Williams Quotes
"I used to make more money in one night than I got in a week working with [Count] Basie. Somebody’d say: 'I'm gonna give you $200, I want you to come over here and sing two songs, 'Every Day I Have the Blues', and 'Stop, Pretty Baby'. People loved that, and women wanted to march out in their finery while I sang 'Stop'." - Joe Williams
Ben Webster Quotes
"If you try all different styles that are in vogue, I think you con yourself. Me, I just stick by my guns; I don't want to play out of another man's bag." - Ben Webster
T-Bone Walker Quotes
"I think if it wasn't for the blues, there wouldn't be no jazz." - T-Bone Walker
Sarah Vaughan Quotes
"I'm not heart-broken if I don't have a hit. But I guess a hit would help. It makes the money go up a bit." - Sarah Vaughan
Clark Terry Quotes
"I don't listen with my eyes... My theory is that a note doesn't give a fuck who plays it, as long as he plays it well." - Clark Terry
Clark Terry Quotes
"That's one thing I love about Norman Granz - when you walk in the studio with him, he turns the set on, and the way you feel, the way you play it, nine times out of ten, he's gonna take that first take. He says: 'That's what you intended. That's the way you felt it.' And he's more than likely right in most instances. Unless there's a very bad blunder, a goof, or something goes askew somewhere along the way; then of course, you have to do it all over again. Norman realizes that guys want to do their best. And usually, when you try very hard, if you know your craft, your best thing will come out on the first take, anyhow." - Clark Terry
Slam Stewart Quotes
"So long as people ask for me, I'll turn up and play. That's for sure." - Slam Stewart
Frank Sinatra Quotes
"It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me." - Frank Sinatra
Zoot Sims Quotes
"I just take a tune and play it the only way I can. That's it. I don't really dwell on it very much. Some people probably do. I can only say I play it the way I feel it." - Zoot Sims
Zoot Sims Quotes
"We were all influenced by Lester [Young]. Listen to the records that he made with [Count] Basie. Nobody's got what he's got. He's still the daddy." - Zoot Sims
Nina Simone Quotes
"Music is a gift and a burden I've had since I can remember who I was." - Nina Simone (1977)
George Russell Quotes
"Whenever I heard a musician do something that I could not explain, I went back to the theory in order to figure it out." - George Russell
Max Roach Quotes
"We never rehearsed, we just got to the stand and said 'Salt Peanuts' or this or that. 'Cos we knew among ourselves what we had been playing on 52nd Street ... [Charles Mingus] was from the West Coast and had a different repertoire ... and Mingus' feelings was hurt, quite frankly, because we didn't give him a chance. We just went right into it, assuming that Mingus knew what we were going to do anyway. During the intermission he complained." - Max Roach (on 'Jazz at Massey Hall')
Max Roach Quotes
"When we got back to New York, a lot of it had been recorded so you couldn't hear the bass anyway, so on some of the pieces, [Charles Mingus] just dubbed himself in. I think it's one of the earliest times that a person overdubbed themselves." - Max Roach (on 'Jazz at Massey Hall')
Keith Richards Quotes
"The electric guitar meant that you could have a band with a drummer and a couple of guitars. And that put a lot of horn players out of work." - Keith Richards
Sun Ra Quotes
"The outer space beings are my brothers. They sent me here. They already know my music." - Sun Ra
Sun Ra Quotes
"The music is not part of this planet in a sense that the spirit of it is about happiness. Most musicians play earth things about what they know, but I found out that they are mostly unhappy and frustrated, and that creeps over into their music." - Sun Ra
Oscar Peterson Quotes
"Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear." - Oscar Peterson
Oscar Peterson Quotes
"If the average jazz artist uses his head and at the outset of his career realizes he won't play as well at fifty as he does at twenty-five, he won't be in a line-up outside the Salvation Army when he's fifty." - Oscar Peterson
Oscar Peterson Quotes
"Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing." - Oscar Peterson
Oscar Peterson Quotes
"He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz." - Oscar Peterson
Charlie Parker Quotes
"It's just music. It's trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes. The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it. It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible." - Charlie Parker
James Moody Quotes
"If I had known then what I know now, I'd have been a much much better player. But if you don't know what it is you don't know, then you don't know how to ask for it."
- James Moody
- James Moody
Thelonious Monk Quotes
"I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - 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." - Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk Quotes
"If the music is eccentric, I have to be. Anybody talented in any way - they're called eccentric." - Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk Quotes
"You know what's the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence." - Thelonious Monk
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions." - Charles Mingus (1955)
Charles Mingus Quotes
"I always thought that no matter what kind of work people did, they should involve themselves totally with all the discrimination they ran into." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
On 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat': "That was for Lester Young. I was playing the Half Note Club the night we heard he died and we went to the bandstand and played a Blues for Lester. I knew the guys would never do that again. I went home and wrote a blues the way I thought they were playing, with different types of chord changes - not just the regular blues - and it became part of the book." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution." - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Quotes
"Our nights didn't begin until after noon. Because in the old days, you'd start Birdland at 8:30 or 9 pm and play until 4 in the morning. Then you'd go out to the corner and talk to a couple of musicians - I used to talk to Oscar Pettiford a whole lot - you'd stand there till 7, 8 or 9, or else go down to the jam session at Minton's." - Charles Mingus
Jimmy McPartland Quotes
"Just starting, as most of us were, we'd make so many mistakes that it was horrible on people's ears. So as I say, we had to move around because neighbors couldn't stand it too long." - Jimmy McPartland
Jimmy McPartland Quotes
"You could get all you wanted to drink but nothing to eat. Just the same, it was better than nothing at all." - Jimmy McPartland
Wingy Manone Quotes
"Would you believe it, all us New Orleans musicians like pretty music: you know, play the tune pretty and swing it right afterwards - in other words, kick it." - Wingy Manone
Wingy Manone Quotes
"I have no regrets and I've done everything in life I wanted to do... So if I go out today or tomorrow it doesn't make no difference. But while I'm alive I want to go on playing. I like to play, and if I couldn't I'd be a miserable old man." - Wingy Manone
Stan Kenton Quotes
"Whenever you play dance music, it serves a function. It becomes a utility; you have to worry about the tempos and what you're going to play for people. But when you're playing for listening, you're free." - Stan Kenton
Jonah Jones Quotes
"You never can say which way things are going in this business. Like myself, I had no idea it was going to happen for me. With bebop on the scene and people turning to rock-and-roll I couldn't have made it no way, wouldn't have bet ten cents on it. But here it come." - Jonah Jones
Milt Jackson Quotes
"Once you see him standing out there in front of that big band, he is really phenomenal and dynamic and it's just like, well, he should never be without a band." - Milt Jackson (on Dizzy Gillespie)
Ray Brown Quotes
"I went up to his [Hank Jones'] house and there were four guys there: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach. Not a bad place to be. Scared shitless, but a nice place to be on my second day in New York." - Ray Brown
Milt Jackson Quotes
"In the daytime, we're sitting about and everybody's on edge as a matter of fact. It may even have been a little bit hostile, because they could not wait until night time came. They would be just overjoyed when it turned dark and we knew it was approaching time to go to work. 'Cause we couldn't wait to sit down and get to that band and hit the first note. From the first note to the last you could hear everything. You could hear that happiness, that togetherness, you can hear it all in that music." - Milt Jackson (on playing with Dizzy Gillespie's band)
Billie Holiday Quotes
"I've been told that nobody sings the word 'hunger' like I do." - Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday Quotes
"I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music." - Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday Quotes
"I think I copied my style from Louis Armstrong. Because I used to like the big volume and the big sound that Bessie Smith got when she sang ... So I liked the feeling that Louis got and I wanted the big volume that Bessie Smith got. But I found that it didn't work with me, because I didn't have a big voice. So anyway between the two of them I sorta got Billie Holiday." - Billie Holiday
Woody Herman Quotes
"Musically, the bebop route was magnificent, but businesswise, it was the dumbest thing I ever did." - Woody Herman
Jimmy Heath Quotes
"'Playboys' was an authentic junkie record. Art Pepper was just out of jail, Chet was arrested a week after the session, and piano player Carl Perkins would die two years later. When the record was recorded I was behind bars myself. In 1955 I was caught with narcotics and had to serve almost five years. Luckily, I was allowed to keep my saxophone in the cell, and I composed a lot during the time. They had to come fetch the music for Playboys from jail." - Jimmy Heath
Coleman Hawkins Quotes
"I didn't even bother to listen to it afterwards. Got through playing it, packed up my horn and walked out." - Coleman Hawkins (on his legendary recording of "Body and Soul")
Toby Hardwick Quotes
"All things considered, I feel I've been truly blessed. Wherever we played I found friends. It wasn't money or a reputation I was after. If you scramble up that ladder, it can be lonely up there." - Toby Hardwick
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"Man, as long as people want to hear jazz, I'll give it to them." - Lionel Hampton
Norman Granz Quotes
"Jazz is America's own. It is played and listened to by all peoples - in harmony together. Pigmentation differences have no place... as in genuine democracy, only performance counts." - Norman Granz
Norman Granz Quotes
"The whole reason for Jazz at the Philharmonic was to take it to places where I could break down segregation." - Norman Granz
Norman Granz Quotes
"If you don't get substantially what you want, be ready to walk. And don't look back." - Norman Granz
Norman Granz Quotes
"At Verve, my bookkeeper would invariably say, 'Well, why do you want to put out Roy Eldridge?' Or 'Why do you want to put out Ben Webster? They don't sell.' And I'd say, 'Well, whether they sell or not, they're important, they should be recorded and they're what Verve stands for, so we don't have to discuss that any further.'" - Normal Granz
Dizzy Gillespie Quotes
"The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play." - Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy Gillespie Quotes
"I was blessed that I got married early and had a good wife. That sort of kept me straight. Probably I would have been like Charlie Parker, you know, involved in drugs or alcohol or something like that if I hadn't had this stability." - Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy Gillespie Quotes
"We loved one another, man. I mean all those stories about the rift ... there was no question of a rift between Charlie Parker and me." - Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy Gillespie Quotes
"It was a financial fiasco because all our checks bounced. Charlie Parker cashed his at the box office, so he was 'in'. Then the master tapes were taken by [Charles] Mingus and put out, and we didn't receive any money for years and years and years and years." - Dizzy Gillespie (on "Jazz at Massey Hall")
Dizzy Gillespie Quotes
"Nothing surpasses my performances with small bands, especially with Charlie Parker. A small band doesn't forestall creativity." - Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy Gillespie Quotes
"When people ask me why my horn's like that, I say 'Why don't you ask a French horn player why the bell curves backwards, and he's got his hand up in it and he's playing with his left fingers?' My horn's not nearly as weird looking as a French horn."
Dizzy Gillespie Quotes
"If it hadn't been for him, there wouldn't have been none of us. I want to thank Mr. Louis Armstrong for my livelihood." - Dizzy Gillespie
Stan Getz Quotes
"My life is music. And in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life."
Stan Getz Quotes
"It's like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It's a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I've never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that's what jazz music is all about."
Stan Getz Quotes
"The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody." - Stan Getz
Stan Getz Quotes
"The more you tighten up physically and mentally in jazz music, and maybe in most music, the worse it gets. That's why first takes have a much better chance of sounding right."
Stan Getz Quotes
"I have always given my sidemen room to maneuver. I believe that if the talent is there, it should be heard. I want my sidemen to find themselves because when they do, it helps the group as well."
Stan Getz Quotes
"I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won't come out." - Stan Getz
Stan Getz Quotes
"When I got this saxophone, it became a religion. There wasn't TV, there wasn't much money, and there was just a real dedication.... I never thought of it as an art. It was just work that I loved. Not just work, but work that I loved. I loved it so much, I would play it if nobody listened to it. Any jazz musician, if there's nobody around to listen, would play just for the sheer joy of improvising music." - Stan Getz
Stan Getz Quotes
"I learn something new every day - to edit, to take out all the extraneous matter and stress form, logic, and content. I try to play beautiful music." - Stan Getz
Stan Getz Quotes
"I was a withdrawn, hypersensitive kid. I would practice the saxophone in the bathroom, and the tenements were so close together that someone from across the alleyways would yell, 'Shut that kid up,' and my mother would say, 'Play louder Stanley, play louder.'" - Stan Getz
Ira Gershwin Quotes
"I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella sing them." - Ira Gershwin
Herb Geller Quotes
"The newspapers printed sensational headlines like 'East Coast vs. West Coast' - as if the musicians of New York and LA were sworn enemies. Nonsense of course, but at least that way we got a little publicity." - Herb Geller
Bud Freeman Quotes
"I believe a great jazz musician is no different from a great artist in any of the arts. If he hadn't been a player he would have written a poem or acted in a play or painted a picture. How many times have we heard musicians say: 'I couldn't make a living so I got out of the business'? A real artist couldn't have said that. He has to play as he has to breathe." - Bud Freeman
George Foreman Quotes
"Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it." - George Foreman
Herb Ellis Quotes
"You may have noticed, I play a lot of old things by Kern and Gershwin. I don't know; to me a Burt Bacharach tune sounds like a third alto part." - Herb Ellis
Duke Ellington Quotes
"The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen." - Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Quotes
"You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it." - Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Quotes
"Playing 'Bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing." - Duke Ellington
Sweets Edison Quotes
"I wouldn't change a thing; not one minute of my life over, if I had it to do again. I'd live the same life because I wouldn't know any other. And I wouldn't wish to, because I've met the most interesting people I could ever have hoped to meet and I've achieved a great deal of artistic satisfaction." - Sweets Edison
Sweets Edison Quotes
"The higher the possum climbs up the tree, the smaller his asshole seems to be." - Sweets Edison
Billy Eckstine Quotes
"My view is that you cannot close your mind and say I don't want to listen to this or that. Because if you can't appreciate the bad for being bad, you can't appreciate the good. If you turn a deaf ear to everything but one style, pretty soon it's not going to work out." - Billy Eckstine
Billy Eckstine Quotes
"Oh, Eckstine, he's a black singer. Not Peggy Lee, she's a Slav singer, or Barbra Streisand, she's a Jewish singer. You don't get that. When we first started on records, you didn't even get a ballad, you sang blues ... The white critics are blues freaks, they'll go into days of research on Huddie Ledbetter, and we black people - I don't remember going across the street to hear Huddie Ledbetter." - Billy Eckstine
Paul Desmond Quotes
"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini." - Paul Desmond
Miles Davis Quotes
"I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"'Birth of the Cool' became a collector's item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy's music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren't a fast listener, you couldn't catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn't sweet, and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss." - Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quotes
"People have said I turn my back [on the live audience] - but it's not like that. On-stage there's always a spot that will register more for the horn player. When I was playing with J.J. Johnson, he used to say 'I'll give you $10 if you let me sit in your spot tonight,' because if it's a good spot for brass, that's where it happens."
Miles Davis Quotes
"Why do you want me to do that again? Didn't I do it good the first time?" - Miles Davis (during the recording sessions of 'Kind of Blue')
Buster Cooper Quotes
"'Buster?' They called me that because I weighed fifteen pounds when I was born on April 4, 1929, but my real name is George." - Buster Cooper
John Coltrane Quotes
"During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace." - John Coltrane
John Coltrane Quotes
"Considering the great heritage in music that we have - the work of the giants of the past, the present, and the promise of those who are to come - I feel that we have every reason to face the future optimistically." - John Coltrane
Ornette Coleman Quotes
"I would like to play for audiences who are not using my music to stimulate their sex organs." - Ornette Coleman
Buddy Childers Quotes
"If you get good enough at what you do, part of getting there is enjoying what other people do and learning from it. If you enjoy it enough you're bound to learn something." - Buddy Childers
Benny Carter Quotes
"He's no Bill Clinton!" - Benny Carter (following a 1996 jam session with the saxophone-playing King of Thailand)
Ray Brown Quotes
"Young people today are prone to take one thing at a time - usually rock and roll. If you can get their attention for jazz, then you're doing something."
Ray Brown Quotes
"[Thelonious] Monk is a subject in itself. I mean, most piano players in most big bands sit down and they play with the band, you know. But Monk would just sit there like this. And all of a sudden there'd be a pause from all the trumpets and everything and Monk would go 'plink!' like that. And everybody would go 'Yeah!'" - Ray Brown
Lawrence Brown Quotes
"I never smoked, drank, or gambled, but I didn't keep myself away from those who did. The bar is still the main place where I meet my friends. I have a Coke and buy them a whiskey. When marijuana became popular in the West around 1932, I used to see them having a ball, but it never attracted me. I remember going to one party with a quart of milk. They drank their liquor and smoked their weed, and I drank my milk."
Bob Brookmeyer Quotes
"A jazz man should be saying what he feels. He's one human being talking to others, telling his story - and that means humor and sadness, joy, all the things that humans have." - Bob Brookmeyer
Eubie Blake Quotes
"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself!" - Eubie Blake (who lived to be 100 years old.)
Count Basie Quotes
"The rough times - now I guess we can say, when you're doin' one-nighters, possibly, in some parts of the United States where it was sort of rough. Now it seems that it was rough, but then we were younger and we were havin' fun." - Count Basie
Chet Baker Quotes
"I soon became aware that there wasn't enough time or opportunity to kiss all the girls in the world. The best thing is to stay cool - just be choosy and wait for the right opportunity." - Chet Baker
Chet Baker Quotes
"In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it's a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don't listen." - Chet Baker
Chet Baker Quotes
"I like to play in the deep register. I was never a high-note specialist. My range goes from the bottom of the horn up to around C or D. High D is about it for me ... about two-and-a-half octaves, I think. But in these two-and-a-half octaves, I can say everything I have to say." - Chet Baker
Chet Baker Quotes
"I don't believe that jazz will ever really die. It's a nice way to express yourself." - Chet Baker
Louis Armstrong Quotes
"Making money ain't nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you're just as graveyard dead as he is." - Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong Quotes
"A lot of the musicians asked me if when I hit my high-Cs on the records I had a clarinet take the notes. Some [thought] I had invented some kind of gadget so I could play high register. They weren't satisfied until they handed me a trumpet that they had with them and had me swing it. Then they cheered." - Louis Armstrong
Cannonball Adderley Quotes
"A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!" - Cannonball Adderley
Norah Jones Quotes
"Without a piano I don't know how to stand, don't know what to do with my hands." - Norah Jones
Norah Jones Quotes
"The coolest thing I've gotten to do in the past few years is guest star on Sesame Street." - Norah Jones
Norah Jones Quotes
"I've always loved to read. But sometimes I go for a year without reading, because I forget to." - Norah Jones
Norah Jones Quotes
"In college I had a weekend gig at a restaurant, a solo thing that was the best practice I could have ever had. That's where I learned to coordinate my singing and my piano playing." - Norah Jones
Norah Jones Quotes
"I got stood up by the letter Y, he was hanging around with his X." - Norah Jones
Norah Jones Quotes
"I don't try to sound like anyone but me anymore. If something is out of my element, I try to avoid it." - Norah Jones
Norah Jones Quotes
"God bless Ray Charles. It was such an honor to meet him and sing with him and actually just to watch him sing from just two feet away." - Norah Jones
Nat King Cole Quotes
"When I first organized the King Cole Trio back in 1937, we were strictly what you would call an instrumental group. To break the monotony, I would sing a few songs here and there between the playing. I sang things I had known over the years. I wasn't trying to give it any special treatment, just singing. I noticed thereafter people started requesting more singing, and it was just one of those things." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you've got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"The Supreme Court is having a hard time integrating schools. What chance do I have to integrate audiences?" - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"The sheriff is at the cash register, and if I don't get a hit soon, I don't know what I'll do." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"The only sport I'm not interested in is horse racing. That's because I don't know the horses personally." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"The only prejudice I've found anywhere in TV is in some advertising agencies, and there isn't so much prejudice as just fear." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"Primarily I'm a meat man, although once in a while I toy with a few vegetables." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"Only time, education and plenty of good schooling will make anti-segregation work." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I was a guinea pig for some hoodlums who thought they could hurt me and frighten me and keep other Negro entertainers from the South." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"It's not the people in the South who create racial problems - it's the people who are governing." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I often wonder whether Negroes like myself who are pretty well known help out at all in breaking down barriers." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I'm proud of our court. It knocks back a lot of the propaganda the Communists put out about the way America treats her Negroes." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I'm not playing for other musicians. We're trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We'll keep him happy." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I may be helping to bring harmony between people through my music." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I'm a musician at heart, I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I can't bear to see myself even in movies. The feeling is complex. I can't stand the sight of myself." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen." - Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole Quotes
"Get me well so I can get on television and tell people to stop smoking." - Nat King Cole [while dying from lung cancer]
Nat King Cole Quotes
"For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death." - Nat King Cole
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"They [the teachers at European conservatories] taught us because they wanted to pass the knowledge on and educate young musicians. It was not because they had to teach because they failed as musicians. There is a huge difference in the reasons why someone is teaching and what they can offer and what they cannot offer." - Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"There is no roles. No one is keeping any roles. The drummer is also answering everybody and everything. So it is a constant conversation and communication between musicians on an extremely high level with extremely valuable material, motifs, and melodies." - Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"The money in the schools overpowers the principles of the purpose." - Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument." -Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it." - Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"Miles Davis had me play and he hired me the following week and after that, everything broke wide open." -Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions, but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap." - Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"I did extensive, extensive recordings and made a classical CD-ROM set, which is still on the market. For ten years, it was by itself as the cream of the crop of samples." - Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself." - Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going." - Miroslav Vitous
Miroslav Vitous Quotes
"I actually met Chick Corea in New York, where I was staying with a bass player friend." - Miroslav Vitous
Mel Torme Quotes
"Whenever I did a good performance, my Dad and my uncles, who were rabid movie fans, took me to the movies. There began my underlying love affair with film." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"There isn't a dearth of it, but I will confess that it's harder for me to find songs on which I'm willing to invest anything from ten to fifteen hours writing an arrangement than it was in times past." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"Talking money is crass; so I'm not going to tell you what I made last year." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"I'm going to continue to talk to the people, because I do believe that if they get to know you and what you are as a human being, they can more appreciate what you are as a performer." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"See, I never wrote arrangements for the band for Judy Garland; I did strictly special material, special lyrics, put together all of her medleys." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"Right now, my career is in three directions: as a performer, as an arranger, as an author - and I don't give any one of them true precedent, or true top marks, as opposed to the other two." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"I would be a liar if I said it wouldn't be lovely and soothing - that's the word - to have a hit single or a hit album." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"I was a singer professionally when I was four years old, and I did not really begin to play any instrument - the first one, of course, was drums - till I was about nine years old." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"It may sound a bit like an army barracks, but the truth of the matter is: there must be some time laid aside for arranging, time for working on either a book or an article - I've written two articles in the last four months for the New York Times book review section." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"I hadn't been a recording artist all that long when albums came on the scene, and I was one of the first singers to point the way to how varied an album's contents could be." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"I got into radio when I was eight, and I was one of the busiest child dramatic actors in America." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"I didn't really have an act per se - a theatrical performance, as opposed to just: here I am, folks, and you're all supposed to be dead quiet while I sing eight or nine songs, then get off the stage." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"How many radio shows I did is lost to memory now; it's in the hundreds - maybe even close to being in the thousands - for the span of years from the time I was eight till I was about fifteen." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"But, in fairness to them, too, the popular song per se is really a pretty shallow medium to perform in." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"Buddy Rich is one of a kind; he's a genius, and that's all there is to it." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"Because obviously the whole purpose of putting records out is purely and simply to make money." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"Because Chicago was to radio what Hollywood was to films and Broadway was to the theatre: it was the hub of radio." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"As regards my feelings about drummers - there's Buddy Rich, and then there's everybody else." - Mel Torme
Mel Torme Quotes
"As Buddy Rich, for instance, broke into the business at the age of three, I think it was, on drums, so indeed did I break into the business at the age of four as a singer." - Mel Torme
Maynard Ferguson Quotes
"The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over." - Maynard Ferguson
Maynard Ferguson Quotes
"Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music." - Maynard Ferguson
Max Roach Quotes
"The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of the Instrument." - Max Roach
Max Roach Quotes
"Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty." - Max Roach
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"Seeing how those companies operate, it didn't amount to a massive vote of confidence in their artists. There was talk of me going to Columbia after that, but nothing happened. I got disillusioned, and I pulled back." - Madeleine Peyroux
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"Once I was in the city, I really enjoyed it. Just to experience things. There was so much new stuff." - Madeleine Peyroux
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"My father's record collection was full of New Orleans music of all kinds. I used to listen to the radio in New York, and all there was on it at the time was Madonna and Michael Jackson, so it sort of passed me by." - Madeleine Peyroux
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"My father had a varied ear, from Hank Williams to Ravel." - Madeleine Peyroux
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances." - Madeleine Peyroux
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"I was very lucky. Things happened, both bad and good, but I never got into real, deep trouble. But it wore me down. By the time I was 18, I was done. I didn't want to live the life any more. I needed to develop past the point that busking takes you to." - Madeleine Peyroux
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"It's wonderful to work with someone with mentor status." - Madeleine Peyroux
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"I'm very conscious of developing my singing, technically and stylistically. I want it to become more individual, express more of me. That's my goal. These songs are steps along that way." - Madeleine Peyroux
Madeleine Peyroux Quotes
"I listened to Billie Holiday a lot in order to learn to sing. She remains one of the extraordinary jazz singers. But my intent is to become my own voice, to be able to interpret these songs in my own way." - Madeleine Peyroux
Louis Prima Quotes
"There's nothing like walking out and watching the people get turned on. Nothing in the world could replace it." - Louis Prima
Louis Prima Quotes
"My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around." - Louis Prima
Louis Prima Quotes
"I wasn't making it with the violin because I was playing all of the 'long hair' stuff." - Louis Prima
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general." - Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God." - Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid." - Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands." - Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s." - Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano." - Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind." - Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things." - Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton Quotes
"Black and white players hadn't appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with Benny Goodman." - Lionel Hampton
Kenny G Quotes
"When I play live, I feel how the audience is going and follow and lead at the same time." - Kenny G
Kenny G Quotes
"What is music anyway? It's a form of communication, and that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people." - Kenny G
Kenny G Quotes
"The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise." - Kenny G
Kenny G Quotes
"The Moment is an album that contains the best music I have ever produced." - Kenny G
Kenny G Quotes
"Just because people play songs with great technique doesn't mean the records are better." - Kenny G
Kenny G Quotes
"I've never personally criticized anyone else's music, but I know that the public's real problem is not the music I make but the perception that I play simple music for money only and for the notoriety and to increase my popularity." - Kenny G
Kenny G Quotes
"I learned so much about playing and touring being on the road and in the studio with Jeff [Lorber], but I'd always played a lot of gigs in Seattle even prior to joining the Fusion." - Kenny G
Kenny G Quotes
"I approach everything in my life the same way; if it feels right, I know it." - Kenny G
Kenny G Quotes
"Being a purely instrumental album, it makes a musical statement, not a religious one, and I hope that people can feel the emotion of the great melodies, even without the words." - Kenny G
