jazz quotes

[alocispepraluger102]

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/jazz.html

[aparxa]

'I have a lot of respect for the Polish people, especially the way they can drink vodka.'

Thelonious Monk

[AndrewHill]

Don't remember where I read it but Cecil Taylor was asked what he thought of Miles Davis's playing and he said something along the lines of, he plays pretty good for a millionaire.

[aparxa]

No fusion, no confusion

Lou Donaldson

[MoGrubb]

My first guitar, a Fender Jazz Master, I traded it in for a Les Paul Deluxe.

Lenny Kravitz

Woah! *tsk*

[aparxa]

Now we gonna play a little tune [bye bye Blackbird] that was made famous by Miles Davis when he was playing jazz.

Lou Donaldson

[DukeCity]

James Moody, talking about all the dancers and production in music videos: "It's like they got you standing over a turd, and they're tryin' to take your attention away from it!"

[Shrdlu]

Lawrence Welk: "And a now we're a going a to play a that famous a Duke Ellington tune Take A Train".

[Chuck Nessa]

High Society

[sidewinder]

"Next week we're going to have Miles back again at the club...........Sir Bernard Miles."

and in a similar vein:

"Joe Henderson will be appearing at the club next week............ Joe 'Piano' Henderson."

- Ronnie Scott

[Guest Bill Barton]

Thanks for that link, Jerry! Very cool site...

____________________________________

"I'm trying to make music a sensual expression, not an academic experiment." - Andrew Hill

"There are no natural barriers. It's all music. It's either hip or it ain't." - Lee Morgan

"Play as well as you can all the time, and if you're truthful to your thing, you'll succeed." - Lester Bowie

"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

"In Africa I discovered what the true purpose of a musician is. We are historians, and it is our purpose to tell the people the true story of our past, and to extend a better vision of the future." - Randy Weston

"We all have music in us - your heartbeat is your drum, your voice is your sound - and music is supposed to put you in tune with nature." - Randy Weston

"Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction." - Max Roach

"I don't think of myself as a jazz musician but a medicine man." - Abdullah Ibrahim

"I think that a musician is like a doctor, he's supposed to heal people and make them feel better." - Steve Turre

"Music has many uses and I think the most perfected use that music has is one of a healing quality." - Ornette Coleman

"Music just may be the most powerful thing on the planet... You cannot exist without it. It can have a healing effect, conveyed in a spirit of love: it can communicate." - Kenny Barron

"The idea is more important than the style or the contents of the style you're trying to play in." - Ornette Coleman

"Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else's personality, that is not art." - Bennie Wallace

"External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument." - Yusef Lateef

"Improvisation is a musical statement of life itself." - Chico Freeman

"The music should be first, not the ego or the personality or the style." - Dewey Redman

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." - Charles Mingus

"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

"I can see forms and shapes in my mind when I solo, just as a painter can see forms and shapes when he starts painting. And I can see different colors." - Elvin Jones

"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

"Music is my religion. Music is the only thing that has never failed me. People let you down, music won't." - Gary Bartz

"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 I play I think of how the phrases move as a dance, or something in nature like a bird or a shooting star." - Don Cherry

"It's important for music to be pure - to be natural, to represent truth." - Don Cherry

"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

"You swing yourself into freedom. You don't block yourself into freedom. Everything derives in a circle." - Beaver Harris

"I think it's important every day to do exactly what you want to have happen from your instrument. Don't practice scales and arpeggios and patterns, but instead practice playing music. Play a song into a tape recorder and see if it makes musical sense. Does it warm you? Does it move you in any way?" - Michael Moore

"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

"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

"Music should use everything. The sadness of life and the fun of life. Anything that provokes a sound that is exciting is good." - Daniel Humair

"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

"With music you can express any emotion, you can paint pictures..." - Sun Ra

"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

"All the music you've ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head. I don't reject that, I use it." - Don Pullen

"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

"I wanna calm people down, put 'em in sort of a dream state, between myth and reality. They just gotta learn to use their intuition. Intuition is a survival mechanism, innate knowledge of the proper thing to do." - Sun Ra

"Music can be the bridge to understanding, but people have to get some knowledge." - Sun Ra

"Music is only a means to an end - it is not the end. The concern is with the condition of man" - Abdullah Ibrahim

"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

"To me, music is a study of life, a study of movement. And at this point, the inspiration for my music doesn't come from other music at all. It comes from things I see and hear in everyday life, or from very strong nature places that I've been to." - Bob Moses

"Music is not everything in life. If a young musician looks at it that way, then he can just play his instrument like putting a nail into a wall." - Joe Zawinul

"Music's the strongest force. It goes right to the energy seat of emotion." - Kirk Lightsey

"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 unsuing heroes of the music. It's the rhythm section that has changed the styles from one period to the other." - Max Roach

"All musical sounds that have been sounded on earth are still hanging in the atmosphere, like a canopy over the earth. You can recapture those sounds if you concentrate deep enough and have enough minds all traveling in the same direction." - Prince Lawsha

"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 heart of music. The saxophone can play and then rest, as can all of them except the drums; the drummer keeps going - he can't afford to stop." - Jo Jones

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

"Rhythm archetypes are a mirror of natural laws and our being." - Reinhard Flatischler

"If you go back to the roots of jazz, it was all about COLLECTIVE improvisation." - Henry Threadgill

"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

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

"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

"I would like to contribute in any kind of musical situation. There are so many colors in music, I won't choose one." - John Stubblefield

"I believe a good musician should be able to play in all kinds of company. I'll play Dixieland and I'll play free - whatever is needed, as long as the music has integrity. I love playing changes - like Johnny Griffin and Sonny Stitt - but I'll also play out when it fits. Any music, man, as long as it tells the truth." - Nathan Davis

"The hippest and the strongest tunes are blues, and we can't ever get away from the blues if we're going to call ourselves 'jazz' musicians. I have never heard a creative musician play modern Amercian music without hearing the blues." - Nat Adderley

"Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building." - Jimmy Rushing

"The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can't sing." - Billie Holiday

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

"Express yourself! That's what the music is all about! That's why I got into the music." - Wilber Morris

I'm interested in ENERGY. I love the feeling of being in a room and playing music with guys that are making ENERGY instead of just sound." - Buell Neidlinger

"Art is like the lifeguard of our society, because artists are the ones that create future realities." - Chick Corea

"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

"Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents, there must be respect for the people that have gone before." - Jon Hendricks

"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 rippping 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

"...black music is a group music. That's why I don't like doing a solo saxophone thing: My feeling stems from rhythm, I really have to feel that rhythmic thing happening." - Jimmy Lyons

"The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul." - Stan Getz

"You must believe in what you're doing and do that because you live what you love and you love what you live. Music is one of the arts that make a person completely naked." - Don Cherry

"Music is not only music - it's a force, like the ocean. It's sound, it's something that you put out there that never stops." - Bill Summers

"You need to make the music strong, and the philosophy behind the music has to be solid. What the music exudes, what it emits, has to be very strong. It's your thinking that brings you things in life. Part of my philosophy to exceed starts right there." - David S. Ware

"Music and dance amplify and make manifest to our senses the unheard tones and unseen waves that weave together the matter of existence." - Yaya Diallo from "The Healing Drum"

"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

"It seems that nowadays the old spirit of the music is coming back around. I feel the same sense of urgency now as I did in the '60s and '70s. Maybe it smoothed out a bit in the '80s and '90s, but it's starting to happen again." - Dave Burrell quoted by Pete Gershon in STN #26.

[Guest Bill Barton]

"The music is a vehicle of the soul.

And our souls hold the answer to the problems we've posed ourselves here.

When the music plays through me, I am healed, and so are others.

This is a beginning, and not just for me. When we see that all of our pain is about learning, and all of our anger and angst is just fear, we can start to heal, heal each other, heal the world.

Let's get busy. Not a lot of time to waste!"

Jessica Williams (from her website)

Here’s Sonny Sharrock speaking of a gig in Oshkosh, Wisconsin with Herbie Mann:

"The promoters were a group of ladies, very nice and obviously very well off, who had rented a hall with the proceeds from the concert going to local charities. I didn’t expect them to enjoy what I was doing, but they didn’t seem to be enjoying Herbie’s flute solos, either, like audiences usually did. After the show, they came backstage and said, 'Well, that was very nice but we wish you had played some of your Tiajuana [sic] numbers.’ They thought Herbie was Herb Alpert!"

(from Bebop and Nothingness by Francis Davis)

"Ten reasons to keep playing this Music:

It's great fun.

It makes people happy.

It helps listeners feel their spirit, their soul, their center.

It helps musicians feel their spirit, their soul, their center.

It brings people together.

It heals the mind and the body.

It transcends ego.

It makes us part of the solution.

It moves civilization forward.

It speaks, in a tongue that is universal, of love, freedom, attainment, peace, and perfection."

(Jessica Williams from her website)

"Music school? Are you kidding? I learned to play the sax in Pontiac Reformatory." - Mezz Mezzrow

"Dim these lights and make me 25 again!" - Von Freeman

"...music, to me, is a beautiful language, a form of communication and self-expression that doesn't need to impress the critics or scare the audience half-to-death with pyrotechnical displays of daring-do... I'm not impressed by billions of notes, drummers who think they're Tony or Elvin (rest assured, they're not), bass players that play in the flute-register (come on...listen to Paul Chambers why dontcha?) and horn players that are more into fashion and posturing than into the music."

Jessica Williams

"Jazz is whatever you are... playing yourself, being yourself."

Mary Lou Williams

"If jazz is going to become healthy and vibrant into the 21st century, it needs to reject the elitist views that may have reflected American Culture fifty years ago, but have no place in modern civilization. These polarities never served us, merely diminished our freedom to grow creatively and spiritually."

Jessica Williams

Here are a couple of thought-provoking quotes from Tomasz Stanko:

"Strong melody can be a two-edged sword. Recognizable phrases can wear out eventually, lose their punch, replacing the charge of excitement with a familiarity which can evolve to drudgery and repulse rather than attract."

"How can a piece of music still surprise the ear which it has struck before? It must be something immediate, contained within the fabric of sound, not contrived ahead of time according to an ulterior motive."

On a lighter note:

Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman: "Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't."

"If somebody don't open a window on this bus, we'll all get sophisticated." - Vido Musso

"Music is a very hard instrument." - Vido Musso

Jim Hall's comment to an overly "busy" colleague: "Don't just do something; stand there!"

"The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'" - (unknown-talking about the Don Ellis band)

"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken taken better care of myself!" - Eubie Blake

Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians: "We never play anything the same way once."

Red Kelly's sign for the bandstand at his Tacoma nightclub: "Go somewhere else and get discovered, and then come here."

These gems are all from Bill Crow's wonderful book "Jazz Anecdotes."

"Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one."

Duke Ellington

"Music is not a commodity, it’s a resource"

Michelle Shocked

From Arthur Taylor's Notes and Tones, Hampton Hawes responds to Taylor's question about the use of electronics in music:

"I'll tell you, man, I don't put nothing down. If somebody wants to play a cabbage, it's all right with me. But I'm going to stick to the wood, because those are my roots, that's the way I came up."

Cue the cabbage solo in here...

"We are star-stuff, we are one vibration in a standing wave, and it doesn't matter if it's called god or goddess or Allah or Aum or Chi or Orgone. It's gravity and light-years and galaxies colliding and little kittens and bodily love and that chill you get when you listen to great music or see a great painting or hear the sounds of the forest."

Jessica Williams from her essay on John Coltrane (she was listening to A Love Supreme when she wrote this.)

"Curiosity may have killed the cats, but wolves thrive on it... curiosity triggers off ongoing research and it is indeed a very strong motivator. Have you ever visited a pigeon-hole? It must be pretty dark and narrow inside, and certainly not a place to dwell upon, so I can‘t imagine spending a lifetime in such a prison!"

John Wolf Brennan

"The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen."

Duke Ellington

"In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."

Charles Mingus

"Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside you, and take some of you with it when it leaves."

Henry Threadgill

"The music has generated all the techniques I use. When I sit down to learn to play something . . . it is not because I want to master a technique. It is because I want to hear what an idea sounds like."

Pat Martino

"What we play is life."

Louis Armstrong

"If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterwards."

Joe Pass

"I'll play it first and figure out what it's called later."

Miles Davis

"In the words of Toru Takemitsu, we're all 'confronting silence.' I think that, with respect for our differences, there is a growing awareness that all music comes from the same place."

Dave Douglas

Joe Locke talking with Jason West from the November 2005 print edition of All About Jazz-Seattle regarding playing 12 hours a day on the streets of NYC with the legendary multi-instrumentalist George Braith:

"Oh man, it was a really deep time spiritually. It was a really formative time. It let me know that I was capable of going beyond what I thought I was capable of. That as a personn, as a human being, I could actually do more than I ever thought possible..."

And Locke continues:

"...We're living in a society where our culture is getting more divided between the haves and the have-nots and finding music that is by of and for the people is becoming too expensive for the people to enjoy... I think that music is supposed to be for all the people who want it, not just the people who are fortunate enough to be wealthy."

"His scraps were my vittles."

Steve Lacy on Cecil Taylor (quoted by Francis Davis in Outcats)

____________________________________________________________

"...film noir, Mahalia Jackson's moan, and the midnight world of dreams. These have been the chief influences on my music."

Ran Blake in Outcats

____________________________________________________________

"...I don't think you have to like art. You have to respond to it."

Borah Bergman in Outcats

"What made me feel a bond with black people, first and foremost, was the music, which I think literally saved my life."

Sheila Jordan

______________________________________________________________

"The only person I ever wanted to steal from was Charlie Parker, and I didn't have to. He gave it to me."

Sheila Jordan

______________________________________________________________

"When I discovered jazz, it felt like being reunited with a family I never knew I had."

Susannah McCorkle

"Improvisation is not standing up there and playing twenty choruses. It is using what’s at hand"

Abdullah Ibrahim

"The ideal situation would be to have as many people as possible. The more people the better! Not just instrumentalists, but singers, painters, sculptors, poets, nutritionists, physicians, and martial artists, to show that music can provide a conducive atmosphere for all other daily activities, as it does in more traditional societies."

Abdullah Ibrahim

"Jazz originals have always been a rarity. Today, they are so scarce that they have become an oddity, something that looks like it doesn’t belong."

Erroll Parker (1/88)

"I treat all music the same. Respect it, and do your best. If you can’t do it, don’t even try. I don’t try anything. I do it."

Miles Davis (5/87)

"What is jazz anyway? The first jazz was contrapuntal, ensemble-oriented stuff. So I still play dixieland in a way."

Steve Lacy

"I like the pure expression of melody. Something that’s important when you play a melody is breathing, so the phrasing is like language. I get that from listening to Miles, and from playing the trumpet myself."

pianist Dave Peck

"Jazz has always been an art form of struggle. It’s a political struggle to get the music heard. Whether it’s my new album or the Liberation Music Orchestra tour, we’re trying to change the direction this country and this administration is going."

Charlie Haden

"What I’m trying to do is attract people to beautiful music. People have the potential to cultivate their ears to appreciate deeper music. But young kids today don’t have the opportunities to develop their ears and eyes and emotions to fully appreciate any art."

Charlie Haden

"We both have a strange taste in notes. It’s like a flavor of ice cream that’s not vanilla. It’s like pistachio with caramel undertones."

Carla Bley talking about Charlie Haden

"[Music] can be regarded as excited speech, imitation of the sounds of nature, an abstract set of symbols, a baring of emotions, an illustration of interpersonal relationships, an intellectual game, a device for inducing reverie, a mating call, a series of dramatic events, an articulation of time and/or space, an athletic contest. A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer . . . and general all around good fellow."

Steve Lacy

"I’ve always felt that the music started out as black but that it’s as much mine now as anyone else’s. I haven’t stolen the music from anybody - I just bring something different to it."

Jim Hall

"When Ornette finished and the Jazztet came on, I turned to the bartender and asked him to dance, because after Ornette, this band that had sounded top-of-the-line just a week before suddenly sounded like the society orchestra at the Hotel Taft."

Paul Bley talking about the Five Spot in 1959

"With Ornette, there was no piano, but I became the piano."

Charlie Haden

"When people believe in boundaries they become part of them."

Don Cherry

"I use the word 'jazz' for music that has improvisation and also can include any culture and can develop all the time. 'Jazz' is not the thing that we can see in a museum. With this definition, jazz is life and life is jazz."

Satoko Fujii

"I'm not going for the categories. I just know that, wow, this music is pretty fun... You're not avant-garde enough for certain crowds or presenters, and then you're too weird for other people. So I don't worry about it."

Matt Wilson

"To say only black people can play jazz is as dangerous as saying only white people are intelligent."

Bill Evans

"One's man requiem is another man's polka."

jazz critic Whitney Balliett

From Notes and Tones:

____________________________________________

Arthur Taylor: Do you have any particular hobbies?

Miles Davis: Making fun of white folks on television. That's my main hobby...

____________________________________________

"I'm always talking about using my horn like a machine gun; but not to kill anybody. I want to shoot them with notes of love. I want them to laugh. I want to give them something positive..."

Johnny Griffin

"I was conceived by Carla Bley and Michael Mantler at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965. Born in 1966, I was immediately swept into the musician's life on the road. After having checked me at the coatroom of the Berlin Jazz Festival, to the horror of the press, my parents realized that I was going to have to learn to play an instrument in order to be useful. But since I was still just a baby and they couldn't leave me alone, they had to bring me on stage with them and keep me under the piano. This is probably why I feel most at home on the stage."

Karen Mantler

"When you listen to an improvising musician, it could change your life. Maybe not always for the better. It may jar you out of your complacency. It may upset your world-view. It may make you VERY uncomfortable."

Jessica Williams

"A piece of music comes out of a particular experience, but it's both personal and universal, just expessed in a personal way. It opens something inside of you, the listener, that helps you find your self too. And therein lies the importance of artists and writers and painters and musicians and free thinkers."

Steve Swell to Ed Hazell in Signal to Noise issue #45 (Spring 2007)

"Just being a great player on your instrument isn't enough in today's jazz world, being versatile is equally as important."

Don Sickler from the "Versatile Reality Clinic" introduction on his website

"Tradition is a terrible tyrant.

Memory, man.

It's better to live in the moment.

I am eating this sandwich.

Know what I mean?"

Fred Katz

"I believe that music should be grown on trees, to be plucked like a fruit without the extravagance of harvest"

Eyvind Kang

"When musicians are reading my music, they're just reading notes. But it's like I have a baby. Then all of a sudden, it's like people dressing up your baby in really weird clothing. There becomes a point where the band takes the piece and makes it their own. I separate from it, and the piece develops on its own. Then I develop a really nice relationship with the piece. Then I forget the whole process of 'childbirth.'"

Maria Schneider

"Over all, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe. . . That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music."

John Coltrane

"Once you can listen to the birds singing and realize that nature was the first orchestra, you begin to understand how the music is in tune with our planet and the universe. The more connections you discover, the more you want to keep learning."

Randy Weston

"You can’t write the same book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting."

Max Roach

"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

"...we are the music we play. And our commitment is to peace, to understanding of life. And we keep trying to purify our music, to purify ourselves, so that we can move ourselves--and those who hear us--to higher levels of peace and understanding. You have to purify and crystallize your sound in order to hypnotize. I'm convinced, you see, that through music, life can be given more meaning. And every kind of music has an influence--either direct or indirect--on the world around it so that after a while the sounds of different types of music go around and bring about psychological changes. And we're trying to bring about peace. In his way, for example, that's what Coltrane, too, is trying to do. To accomplish this, I must have spiritual men playing with me. Since we are the music we play, our way of life has to be clean or else the music can't be kept pure."

Albert Ayler

"I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was."

Paul Desmond

"Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night."

Count Basie

[Shrdlu]

"Next week we're going to have Miles back again at the club...........Sir Bernard Miles."

and in a similar vein:

"Joe Henderson will be appearing at the club next week............ Joe 'Piano' Henderson."

- Ronnie Scott

Ronnie's wise cracks are so recognizable that you could tell that was him without it even being said. I still remember an evening at his club in 1974. Btw, Zoot was there that night, and mmmm he was good.

[neveronfriday]

Still my favorite:

"I never practice my guitar ... from time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat." (Wes Montgomery)