Jazz Quotes - Page 39

• I finally realized that my relaxation is practicing the piano and writing. I've tried to do other things, but I've learned through the decades, that this is what I enjoy, practicing music and writing.

  Andrew Hill

  Music, Writing, Piano

  "A Fireside Chat With Andrew Hill". Interview with Fred Jung, jazzweekly.com.

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• These magic moments when rhythms and harmonies extend themselves and jell together and the people become another instrument. These things are priceless and they can't be learned; they can only be felt.

  Andrew Hill

  Music, Magic Moments, People

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• The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can't sing.

  Billie Holiday

  Music, Feelings, Singing

  Billie Holiday, William Dufty (2011). “Lady Sings the Blues: The 50th-Anniversay Edition with a Revised Discography”, p.163, Broadway Books

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• [Lee Morgan] was the only young cat that scared me when he played. He had so much fire and natural feeling. I had more technique, but he had that feeling. People seemed to like him more than they like me at the beginning.

  Freddie Hubbard

  Music, Cat, Fire

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• Don't make the mistakes I made of not taking care of myself. Please, keeps your chops cool and don't overblow. If you are going to play hard, be sure to warm up. I'd get carried away trying to stay right with the momentum [of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers]. I used to try and play like Coltrane and solo for 30 or 40 choruses. It all caught up with me.

  Freddie Hubbard

  Music, Art, Mistake

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• I used to try to play like [Miles Davis], and Miles caught me copying him one night at Birdland. He said, 'Hey man, why don't you play some of your own stuff.' So, I finally did, because I had copied all his solos.

  Freddie Hubbard

  Music, Night, Men

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• I am an improviser, ... I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

  Joe Zawinul

  Music, Writing, May

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• I think we've all had enough of Coltrane saxophonists. There's a case of someone ruining a generation of saxophonists, as Louis Armstrong may have ruined a generation of trumpeters.

  Paul Bley

  Thinking, Generations, May

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• If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

  Count Basie

  Play, Guy, Soul

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• I'll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I'd never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I'd never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn't much like it at first.

  Count Basie

  Sound, Different, Stylist

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• People said I'd never make 35, then I'd never make 40, 45; now I'm almost 50, so Im beginning to think maybe they might be wrong.

  Chet Baker

  Thinking, People, Might

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• The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

  Chet Baker

  Play, Inspired, Drummer

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• His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this - or more accurately, because of this - his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz - at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form.

  Gunther Schuller

  Inspiration, Thinking, Color

  "All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century". Book by John Rockwell, 1983.

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• You know, John Coltrane has been sort of a god to me. Seems like, in a way, he didn't get the inspiration out of other musicians. He had it. When you hear a cat do a thing like that, you got to go along with him. I think I heard Coltrane before I really got close to Miles [Davis]. Miles had a tricky way of playing his horn that I didn't understand as much as I did Coltrane. I really didn't understand what Coltrane was doing, but it was so exciting the thing that he was doing.

  Wes Montgomery

  Inspiration, Cat, Thinking

  Downbeat magazine Interview, 1961.

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• He sounded to me like he's supposed to be the savior of jazz. Sometimes people speak as though someone asked them a question. Well, no one asked him a question.

  Miles Davis

  People, Sometimes, Speak

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• When I joined the band I didn't know any of the tunes, and when I left the band I didn't know any of the tunes!

  Keith Jarrett

  Tunes, Band, Knows

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• Learn to play the piano, man, and then you can figure out crazy solos of your own.

  Dizzy Gillespie

  Crazy, Men, Play

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• It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?

  Miles Davis

  Years, Practice, Play

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• My greatest teacher was not a vocal coach, not the work of other singers, but the way Tommy Dorsey breathed and phrased on the trombone.

  Frank Sinatra

  Teacher, Singers, Way

  Foreword to George T Simon The Big Bands (1967).

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• 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

  Wish, Important, Dodge

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

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• Tommy Dorsey would walk up to you if you had a tuxedo on and make sure you didn't have on white socks.

  Louie Bellson

  White, Tuxedos, Up To You

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• Tommy Dorsey was the last of the band leaders... He was ahead of his time; if he got drunk, he got difficult, but then who the hell isn't difficult when you get drunk.

  Dick Haymes

  Drunk, Leader, Band

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• Bebop has set music back twenty years.

  Tommy Dorsey

  Years, Twenties, Bebop

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• I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King's son.

  Duke Ellington

  Kings, Son, Night

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• Listen to her voice, don't look at her.

  Ella Fitzgerald

  Voice, Looks

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