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Jazz Quotes

These are intended to make you laugh, think, nod knowingly (up and down) or angrily (from side to side). Please feel free to send me new ones!--Randy

I wish you wouldn't make the strings such an important part of your arrangements because frankly they're only a tax dodge!
-Tommy Dorsey (to arranger Nelson Riddle)-

Tastes are created by the business interests. How else can you explain the popularity of Al Hirt?
-Charles Mingus-

The outer space beings are my brothers. They sent me here. They already know my music.
-Sun Ra-

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-

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-

As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.
-Miles Davis-

Are big bands coming back? Sure, every football season.
-Woody Herman-

Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread -- without it, it's flat.
-Carmen McCrae-

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout.
-Melvin Maddocks-

Playing "bop" is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
-Duke Ellington-

My feeling is, music is a more eloquent international language than Coca-Cola or McDonalds.
-Paul Horn-

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
-Dizzy Gillespie-

I don't mind being the butt of a joke-if it's a funny joke.
-Kenny G.-

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-

I spent a lot of time playing in miserable places that were not a lot of fun. Somebody once said it is character building and I was like 'My character is just fine.'
-Diana Krall-

"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." --Charles Mingus

"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

"It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's
becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing." --Pat Metheny

"Music washes away the dust of every day life." --Art Blakey

"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini." --Paul Desmond

"Man, if you have to ask what it (jazz) is, you'll never know" --Louis Armstrong

"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

"Every individual has to find his own identity. Jazz is a language.
Understanding the vocabulary, syntax, everything involved, and putting it all together-that's what jazz musicians have to do. And that's the kind of genius that a person like Thelonious had". --Larry Ridley in Straight, No Chaser-The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk, Leslie Gourse.

"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 after the death of Charlie Parker quoted in Ted Gioia's History Of Jazz.

"Getting into jazz singing professionally is chiefly a matter of
developing a stoical disregard for decent food, decent lodgings and a decent income" --Barry Ulanov quoted in Crother and Pinfold.

"Hank Jones is so good, he should be deported" --George Shearing

"A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges." --Benny Green

"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."
--Charlie Parker

At a recording session on Christmas Eve 1954, Miles Davis and
Thelonious had a disagreement about whether the pianist should 'lay out' or not during Miles' solo. Rumor had it that there was a fight. (There is a 'verbal exchange' on the recording at the beginning of "The Man I Love" on 'Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants.')

Miles Davis - "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."

Thelonious Monk - "Miles'd got killed if he hit me."

When someone marveled at his longevity Eubie [Blake] commented with a shrug. "If I'd known I was going to live this long I would've taken better care of myself!"

A story is told of Miles and Coltrane jamming one night when Miles
asked why 'Trane played for so long during his solos. Coltrane said,
"Once I get going, I just don't know how to stop, man." To which Miles replied in his raspy voice, "Take the horn outta your mouth."

Steve Lacy once defined a jazz musician this way:

"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."

"I sat up listening to George Butler tell me one year that he's
bringing out 200 albums, and all of 'em from people who are dead. And that'll really make jazz go on? That's some really dumb shit. Fuckin' macabre necrophilia or some shit! And then he's going to put out the Marsalis boys. There's some dead guys again!" --David Murray

Again, David Murray on the so called 'Young Lions'

"I call 'em neo-con artists. That's my new term 'cause they call
themselves neo-conservatives. They're conning the public into thinking that nothing happened in jazz since the 50's, including some of the great innovations from John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and everybody who was happening during that time. They're conning the public into thinking that they're the guys who actually created this stuff, when actually they're just playing a tired version of some music that really has some fire to it."

Oscar Peterson: When asked to comment on his later compositions having so much more technical skill, layering, depth, insight and sensitivity. 'That's because I'm old!'

When Ray Brown first started to play in Dizzy Gillespie's band back in the forties he found himself playing a very different kind of music than he was used to. It wasn't easy keeping up with the likes of Diz and Bird, but he hung in there night after night. He was able to play solos as well as attempting to come up with the right bassline for each chord change. According to Brown: "After I'd been with Dizzy about a month and figured I had everything down, I cornered him after the gig and said, 'Diz, how'm I doin'? He said,'Oh fine. Except you're playing the wrong notes'."

He's no Bill Clinton!" -- Benny Carter (upon returning from jamming
with the saxophone-playing King of Thailand, 2/96)

"The best thing you can do is to be a woman and stand before the world and speak your heart." - Abbey Lincoln

"The louder they play (the band) the softer I sing." - Joe Williams

“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

“My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.” - Bill Evans

“Especially, I want my work–and the trios if possible–to sing.” - Bill Evans

"If you want to make money in music, get into the band uniform business." - Henry Mancini

"To me, nostalgia is nothing more than a mindless plundering of the past for the commonplace." - Mel Torme

"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

"It's always interesting to me that any time anyone hears something new they immediately have to categorize it or they don't feel comfortable. It's also one way not to experience something." - Dave Friedman

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas... I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

"Originality cannot be a goal. It is simply inevitable. The truly pathbreaking step can never be predicted, and certainly not by the person who makes it at the time he makes it. He clears as he goes, evolves his own techniques, devises his own tools, ignores where he must. And his path cannot be retraced, because each of us is an original being." - Harry Partch

"I never thought innovation as such was very important. Not when you have to think about it... If you're going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you'll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves." - Count Basie

"Art leaves something to the listener; that's what separates art from craft." - Henry Threadgill

"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

"When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them." - Don Cherry

"You have your own perceptions as an artist because you're put on this planet to create mystery, but you're put here to unravel mysteries too." - Anthony Davis

"I really think of music very much in terms of math, geometry, parallel things, things in contrary motions, chunks that cross and weave, and I think that much of what we perceive in music and understand in music is really a kind of aural, multi-dimensional geometry: kind of flying in the air." - Maria Schneider

"The drum is surely the lord of music, is it not?" - Hsun Tzu (born ca. 312 BC)

"Music is the great arbiter of the world, the key to central harmony, and a necessary requirement of human emotion." - Hsun Tzu

"Without love there is no art. When the artist is playing beautifully there is no 'me"; there is love and beauty, and this is art. This is skill in action." - J. Krishnamurti

"Life is lived only once. And the less seriously the better." - Paul Bowles

"If sound is music and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound. If the sound is effective, it should actually have a chemical - some sort of physiological - effect on the listener, so he doesn't have to hear that sound again." - Keith Jarrett

"Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like 'new music,' 'avant-garde,' or something like that, I think it's like cutting out half the dictionary." - Archie Shepp

"Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I'm concerned with retaining that process." - Bill Evans

"I am a free composer. In other words, I have no rules. There is no predisposition. I approach my writing the same way I approach my playing, my improvising. My writing IS improvising." - Sam Rivers

"Technique has nothing to do with music... The question is what you do with it. I may have been able to do anything I wanted on the trumpet by high school, but that doesn't mean it was any good." - Ruby Braff

"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

Q: "What do you look for in a person to play with you?"
A: "His carriage first. His carriage of the instrument - you can tell whether he plays or not by the way he carries the instrument, whether it MEANS something to him or not." - Miles Davis to Cheryl McCall

"The hardest thing for a musician to learn is how to play WITH people. That's what made the Basie rhythm section." - Jo Jones

"Improvised music is the most immediate and direct form of art, as it is the only one in which the listener becomes a participant in each event. Due to this fact, the music itself is only the acoustic materialization of an instant emotional and spiritual interaction among everyone present." - Eje Thelin

"The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it. If you're swept away by it you can't wait to do it again and the same magical moments always come." - Bobby Hutcherson

"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

"I think that the rhythm sections, drummers in particular, are the unsung heroes of the music. It's the rhythm section that has changed the styles from one period to the other." - Max Roach

"You don't see the European classical musicians allowing the music of Bach, Brahms, or Beethoven to become extinct. That music has gone on for centuries and centuries. We have the same obligation. Why do we have to become so 'hip' that we can say, 'Bebop is square,' or "New Orleans is square'? This, to me, is a shame." - Rahsaan Roland Kirk

"Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul; all the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician." - John McLaughlin

"The symphonic orchestras have sponsors, people who give them endowments, and I think it should be the same way with jazz - because this is a national treasure." - Lee Morgan

"The drum is the first instrument. Without it, you lose all the context." - Philip Wilson

"Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz." - Sonny Rollins

"All creative music is a little of what you FEEL and a little of what you KNOW." - (unknown)

"Music, which is to me religion, and life, and love, and truth, is very important and it's a very serious kind of thing. It requires a bit of thought and quite a bit of sincerity." - Billy Harper

"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

"Time and rhythm are the most important elements in music. If both aren't well conceived, organized, and executed, no amount of notes will make the piece a meaningful artistic experience." - Anthony Davis

"Music is one of the arts that make a person completely naked." - Don Cherry

"When I look back at this period, the history of how the new music was created and functioned, I equate myself with Herbie Nichols, because they forced him out with no work. It happened to Billie Holiday - she died from no work. You kill a genius if you don't let him function. You can't be a genius in the kitchen at home. You are a genius but you're dying. Now I work a festival a year, two festivals a year out of maybe a thousand in the world. Five hundred in Europe. It makes me a little crazy, because I practice so hard not to die." - Sunny Murray interviewed by Dan Warburton in Fall 2001 Signal to Noise

"We must rededicate ourselves to the hope of world peace, human rights, and cosmic destiny. The challenge of creative music has never been more important than in periods of profound unrest and re-alignment." - Anthony Braxton (quoted by Mike Heffley in Signal to Noise, Issue 24, Winter 2002)

"This is America. You could walk into the Ritz Carlton stark naked with a million dollars under your arm, and they'll say, 'Yessir, how can I help you?' If anybody's shocked that the success of art in America is dependent on the dollar, they'd better wake up. This is the nature of America." - Hal Galper (quoted by Don Glasgo in Jazz Improv, Volume 3, Number 3)

"I am well aware that it is impossible for a human being to create anything that doesn't already exist. We become a center for (energy) to flow through. Once you get a view of the magic taking place all the time everywhere, then all you have to do is become an opening for that to come through... As soon as I put my hands on the piano, I'm in what people call an altered state - I go to another dimension instantly. And I'm often in that dimension anyway. The music that I hear is first of all, a kind of silent energy. As that translates into sound, it sounds more like a voice." - Joanne Brackeen

"God loves Black sound."

"Y'know, Music is a beautiful thing.
When I'm reincarnated, I'm gonna come back as a musical note!
That way can't nobody capture me.
They can use the hell out of me
but ain't nothin' too much they can do to me.
They can mess me up. They can play the wrong note.
They can play a C, but they can't really destroy a C.
All it is, is a tone.
So I'm gonna come back as a note!"

— Rahsaan Roland Kirk

"God loves Black sound."

"Y'know, Music is a beautiful thing.
When I'm reincarnated, I'm gonna come back as a musical note!
That way can't nobody capture me.
They can use the hell out of me
but ain't nothin' too much they can do to me.
They can mess me up. They can play the wrong note.
They can play a C, but they can't really destroy a C.
All it is, is a tone.
So I'm gonna come back as a note!"

— Rahsaan Roland Kirk

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