Musical Quotes - Page 37

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

  Stan Getz

  Music, People, Soul

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• A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

  Stan Getz

  Music, Ideas, Jazz

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• Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

  Stan Kenton

  Funny, Music, Clever

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• When you get to the top, don't forget to send the elevator down for the next guy.

  Stan Kenton

  Music, Guy, Next

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• The world thinks that music is a commercial commodity. I'm glad that is not my code.

  Sun Ra

  Music, Thinking, World

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• 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

  Music, Dream, Eye

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• I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Anything Goes, Jazz

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• Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Memorable, Thinking

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• If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Bops, Jazz

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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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• Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Music, Decision, Splits

  Wynton Marsalis, Geoffrey Ward (2008). “Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life”, p.8, Random House

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• How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Music, Mean, Understanding

  Wynton Marsalis, Geoffrey Ward (2008). “Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life”, p.15, Random House

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• External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

  Yusef Lateef

  Music, Jazz, Instruments

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• As long as you've got your horn in your mouth, you're developing.

  Zoot Sims

  Music, Long, Mouths

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• If I can't play music, what am I gonna do? Music keeps people sane. When you enjoy yourself, most of the time the people who are listening to you enjoy it.

  Zoot Sims

  Music, Play, People

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• Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

  Edgard Varese

  Music, Dream, Mean

  "Classic Essays on Twentieth-century Music: A Continuing Symposium". Book by Richard Kostelanetz, 1996.

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• Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

  Gary Burton

  Music, Landscape, Jazz

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• Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

  Ornette Coleman

  Music, Memorable, Night

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• I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

  Miles Davis

  Music, Play, Way

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• I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

  Paul Desmond

  Music, Jazz, Jazz Music

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• I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

  Paul Desmond

  Music, Thinking, Mind

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• I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

  Oscar Peterson

  Music, Believe, Ideas

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• Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Poetry

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Sartor Resartus”, p.247

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• Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else's personality, that is not art.

  Bennie Wallace

  Music, Art, Self

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• "Music, for me, has always been a place where anything is possible--a refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together, and anything can happen. We are limited only by our imaginations.

  Bill Frisell

  Music, Imagination, People

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