Musical Quotes - Page 38

• One thing I like about jazz, kid, is that I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?

  Bix Beiderbecke

  Music, Kids, Next

  33 Copy quote

• Count Basie was college, but Duke Ellington was graduate school.

  Clark Terry

  Music, School, College

  11 Copy quote

• Imitate, assimilate, and innovate.

  Clark Terry

  Music, Jazz

  55 Copy quote

• You may have holes in your shoes, but don't let the people out front know it. Shine the tops.

  Earl Hines

  Music, Shoes, People

  Stanley Dance, Earl Hines (1983). “The World of Earl Hines”

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• Jazz is improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with earthy elegance, nuance and subtlety, with the integrity of individual expression within (usually) a group context, with true democracy in action.

  Greg Thomas

  Music, Integrity, Expression

  4 Copy quote

• Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise... but a way of life.

  Lester Bowie

  Music, Memorable, Exercise

  48 Copy quote

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

  Steve Turre

  Music, Feel Better, Thinking

  45 Copy quote

• Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.

  Wes Montgomery

  Music, Play, African American

  70 Copy quote

• 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 ripping it down and building something new.

  Woody Shaw

  Music, Country, Rip

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• If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits."

  Jean-Jacques Nattiez

  Music, Writing, Flirting

  Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990). “Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music”, p.99, Princeton University Press

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• Jazz has the ability to absorb & transform influences from diverse musical styles.

  Andrew S. Gilbert

  Music, Style, Jazz

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• Sounds of daily life are musical. I try to absorb the intricacies of sounds as if I were listening to music.

  Tom Harrell

  Music, Listening, Trying

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• Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

  Pat Martino

  Music, Jazz And Life, Jazz

  47 Copy quote

• Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

  Max Roach

  Music, Roles, Jazz

  25 Copy quote

• The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of their instrument.

  Max Roach

  Music, People, Jazz

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• Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments & collectively create a thing of beauty.

  Max Roach

  Music, Jazz, Form

  43 Copy quote

• Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments - notably those of the violin - but it seems to set a piano's teeth on edge.

  Mark Twain

  Piano, Age, Teeth

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.5802, Delphi Classics

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• Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.

  Leon Trotsky

  Men, Average, Voice

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• Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat.

  Carmen McRae

  Inspirational, Music, Yeast

  57 Copy quote

• I always tell people, it took me 10 minutes and 35 years in the business. I get tired of playing it ["Lullaby of Birdland"], but not of collecting the royalties.

  George Shearing

  Music, Tired, Years

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• When people ask me how is it I was a musician, I facetiously say that I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and in a previous life I was Johann Sebastian Bach's guide dog.

  George Shearing

  Music, Dog, People

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• Traveling with a big band is like being an inmate in a traveling zoo.

  Hoagy Carmichael

  Music, Zoos, Inmates

  Hoagy Carmichael, Stephen Longstreet (1999). “The Stardust Road & Sometimes I Wonder: The Autobiography of Hoagy Carmichael”

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• I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

  James Taylor

  Music, Play, People

  52 Copy quote

• The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.

  John Lewis

  Music, Rewards, Playing Jazz

  21 Copy quote

• If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn't be playing anything of depth.

  Joshua Redman

  Music, Depth, Jazz

  47 Copy quote