Jazz Music Quotes - Page 3

• I tell my students, 'It's an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn its language all the way through. How are you going to know what's new to play, if you haven't listened to everything that's old?'

  Jackie McLean

  Music, Play, Important

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• I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.

  Sonny Rollins

  Musician, Way, Facts

  14 Copy quote

• Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost.

  Albert Ayler

  Music, Father, Son

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• If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music.

  Charles Mingus

  Music, Reality, Escaping

  "An Open Letter To Miles Davis". Charles Mingus, Downbeat Magazine, November 30, 1955.

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• Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Past, Self

  Wynton Marsalis, Geoffrey Ward (2008). “Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life”, p.13, Random House

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• A goal is a dream with a finish line.

  Duke Ellington

  Inspirational, Music, Dream

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• Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

  Frank Zappa

  Music, Smell, Free Jazz

  Song: Be-Bop Tango, 1974

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• Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Missing You, Playing Jazz

  1954 In Look, 10 Aug.

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• People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.

  Cab Calloway

  Music, Mind, Ordinary

  "Of Minnie the Moocher and Me".

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• ...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

  Pat Metheny

  Musical, Jazz And Life, Verbs

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• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

  Aldous Huxley

  Motivational, Music, Wisdom

  Music at Night (1931) p. 17

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• Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

  Miles Davis

  Life, Music, Beautiful

  180 Copy quote
• 

  Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

  Steve Martin

  Funny, Music, Dance

  68 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rahsaan Roland Kirk

  Music, Beautiful, Crazy

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• 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

  Music, Fashion, Believe

  90 Copy quote

• Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

  Ralph Ellison

  Play, Style, Musician

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.364, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

  Miles Davis

  Music, Play, Horns

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

  Gary Bartz

  Music, People, Jazz

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• 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

  Music, Wish, Firsts

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• 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

  Music, Dedication, Important

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• They tell me Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

  Edgar Wilson Nye

  Music, Sound, Opera

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• In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That's a little bit too much.

  Miles Davis

  Music, Mistake, Europe

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• Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

  George Foreman

  Music, Sports, People

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• Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

  George Szell

  Music, Giving, Jazz And Life

  Newsweek 28 Jan. 1963

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• 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 doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Years, Play

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