Jazz Quotes - Page 2

• It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

  Dizzy Gillespie

  Music, Taken, Play

  Quoted in N Hentoff Jazz Is (1978).

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• 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

  Music, Spiritual, Expression

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• You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

  Charlie Parker

  Music, Faith, Practice

  "Acting Is a Job: Real-life Lessons About the Acting Business". Book by Jason Pugatch, p. 73, 2006.

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• It's either hip or it ain't.

  Lee Morgan

  Hips

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• Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

  Charles Mingus

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Music

  Charles Mingus' statement in Mainliner Magazine (July 1977); later quoted in Olivia Bertagnolli "Creativity and the writing process" (p. 182), 1982.

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• 

  Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST.

  Frank Zappa

  Love, Music, Wisdom

  Song: Packard Goose

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• If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out.

  Louis Armstrong

  Music, Blow, Ifs

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• 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

  Music, Lying, Tin Pan Alley

  Duke Ellington (1973). “Music is my mistress”, Doubleday Books

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• Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

  Nina Simone

  Music, White, Racism

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Jazz should be much less about stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content.

  Booker Little

  Stress, Emotional, Exhibitionism

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• Jazz is the music of the body.

  Anais Nin

  Body, Jazz Music

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• It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

  Art Blakey

  Music, Intelligent, Ears

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  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

  Music, Art, Men

  Quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955)

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• When you're dead, you're done.

  Louis Armstrong

  Done, Jazz Music

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• By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Daughter, Mother

  "At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene". Book by Nat Hentoff, 2010.

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• I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.

  Billie Holiday

  Change, Music, Hate

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• There is no such thing as a wrong note.

  Art Tatum

  Music, Notes, Notes Music

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• Jazz is about being in the moment.

  Herbie Hancock

  Music, Moments, Jazz Music

  Herbie Hancock, Lisa Dickey (2014). “Herbie Hancock: Possibilities”, p.10, Penguin

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• The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

  Van Morrison

  Music, Goes On

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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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• This is so nice, it must be illegal.

  Fats Waller

  Music, Nice, Illegal

  Fats Waller (2001). “Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller: Performances in Transcription, 1927-1943”, p.3, A-R Editions, Inc.

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• Don't bullshit' just play.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Play, Bullshit

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• People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

  Witold Lutosławski

  Music, Airports, People

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• Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Birthday, Children, Party

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.5, e-artnow

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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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