In The Words Of Famous Jazz Cats ...

[Ron Thorne]

Sorry, but I couldn't wait for the "old" JC archives to begin cutting and pasting some wonderful gems from one of my favorite threads there.

So, here's a new start:

"Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yourself." -- Miles Dewey Davis, Jr.

"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis

"I say, 'Play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years'." - Thelonious Monk.

And for a final quote to begin this new chapter, one for a grin, which we all could use right about now.

"He's no Bill Clinton! " - Benny Carter (following a 1996 jam session with the saxophone-playing King of Thailand)

[Ron Thorne]

I'm really not trying to "Bogart" this thread, just trying to get it going.


“I don’t play the clarinet as an instrument,
I play the clarinet as part of my body and spirit.

I don't try to play clarinet, I almost act as if it isn't there, I never practice, I don't warm up. I go down a scale toodle-oodle-oodle, make sure the clarinet works, that's all I do. The clarinet works or it doesn't work. I don't give it a second chance." - Tony Scott

"A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it." - Miles Davis

Down Beat 3/25/76 -

"Art Blakey: Bu's Delights and Laments,"
by John B Litweiler

Art Blakey on Thelonious Monk:

"I have yet to meet the man who can beat him at chess, or even checkers, or ping-pong. Monk had all the drummers, everybody was so happy to work with Monk. I joined the Giants of Jazz just because Monk was in there, and I had a chance to be around Dizzy and the cats for a minute. We just made the one tour. The cats are stars, and they're set in their ways. We did the one trio date in London ("the two Black Lion Monk LPs"), and he just did it because they asked him to and I did it because I'd do anything they'd ask me to do with Monk.

"He was responsible for me when I moved from Pittsburgh to New York. He used to take me and Bud Powell around to all the clubs to play. If the musicians didn't want us to sit in, he'd run them off the stage, sit down, and play with me. At that time jobs were so few, and musicians had cliques. Times were tight, things were changing, but Monk was just outstanding in himself. He's a great person."

[Uli]

Paul Bley:

"Ornette was so early that Coltrane was an interim step which coexisted with Ornette, whereas historically it should have preceeded Ornette".

[mmilovan]

Pres:

"I don't like to read music, just... soul!"

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks for the additions, Uli and mmilovan!

· The chief trouble with jazz is that there is not enough of it; some of it we have to listen to twice. -- Don Herold

· The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed. -- André Previn

· If it wasn't for [pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, gangsters, and gamblers] there wouldn't be no jazz! They supported the club owners who bought the music. It wasn't the middle-class people who said "Let's go hear Charlie Parker tonight." -- Betty Carter

· You can do anything you want to do, if you know what to do. -- Betty Carter

· There's lots of music that's played because it applies to a particular race or style, but music is not a race or a style. It's an idea. -- Ornette Coleman, Alto Saxophonist

· Jazz is so difficult. A lot of people think once they've learned these licks they can get up and play them for the rest of their life. But that's not being truthful to the music 'cause it's not developing. Cats you hear that don't make no mistakes? They ain't trying to do nothing. Everything they hear is on the mark, but they've played it so many times... I've built a whole career out of making mistakes! -- Lester Bowie

[Ron Thorne]

Ok, I'll keep this thread afloat for a while, as necessary.

I'm confident that many of the same posters who contributed such wonderful quotes on the "original" thread will emerge soon.

In the meantime ...

"The best thing you can do is to be a woman and stand before the world and speak your heart." - Abbey Lincoln

"The louder they play (the band) the softer I sing." - Joe Williams

“A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!” - Cannonball Adderley

“My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.” - Bill Evans

“Especially, I want my work–and the trios if possible–to sing.” - Bill Evans

I'm at a loss for words with respect to a response to the final quote. Ok, two words ... they "sing"!

[MRS]

"I don't like crowds unless they're paying to see Cannonball."

Julian Adderley

[willy]

"Man, That cat is nuts!" -- Monk on Ornette Coleman

[Ron Thorne]

“I’ve never heard anything Wynton (Marsalis) played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me… He’s jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty.” - Keith Jarrett

“Reimbursement may be sometimes small, but then great ability can never be measured by the tickets at the gate.” - Eddie Harris

“If you believe, you will. If you don’t, you won’t.” - Eddie Harris

“If there’s any such thing as a perfect man, I think John Coltrane was one. And I think that kind of perfection has to come from a greater force than there is here on earth.” - Elvin Jones

“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air, you can never capture it again.” - Eric Dolphy

“Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.” - Max Roach

[mmilovan]

"The greatest American poet " - John Lewis about Lester Young

[Ron Thorne]

"Music is the healing force of the universe"- Albert Ayler

[graypencil]

" I like to old 78s better than the LPs ..they're much easier to break.. " (Leroy Vinnegar: at the Icelandic/Americans Club in Hawthorne , CA ..circa 1969 .when asked by a patron which kind of records he preferred .. )

" Gawddammit ..I thought y'all was gonna send a sub ..not a destroyer " ( 1964 ..the beloved Dallas TX contractor/lead trumpeter George Cherb.. chastising a musician on his less than adequate replacement )

" Stop sweating on my piano .. " ( The late great Walter Bishop Jr ..to Terry Gibbs ..at the Jazz Workshop in SFO, 1969.. upon completion of one of Terrys imitation Hamp "two fingered piano" choruses during a gig ..)

"Well, Shit ..whaddya want ? ..time or changes ?" ( sub bass player to pianist Pat Moran upon totally destroying an up tempo number at the Tropics, Dayton OH circa 1958 ..p.s. ..he wasn't back the next night ..)

[Ron Thorne]

“When Lester plays, he almost seems to be singing; one can almost hear the words.” - Billie Holiday

“My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.” - Bill Evans

“Art is constant tension and release. That is where artists live, between the two, or at times, submerged in either. The challenge is never ending perfection is impossible, it could always be different, better, or worse. It’s not important, just process and striving to be like the man who walks the trapeze maintaining balance.” - Dave Liebman

[Salvador Dali Lama]

"I figure if horses can eat green shit all day and run like a motherfucker, why not me too?"

- miles davis

[Ron Thorne]

“If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.” - Miles Davis

“The outer space beings are my brothers. They sent me here. They already know my music.” - Sun Ra

“So until we see you again, bright moments and keep searchin’ for your mystery note on the universal piano of life. ” - Rahsaan Roland Kirk

“The very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid.” - Brad Mehldau

[larry]

Taken totally out of context, but it's such a good rant, that it deserves mention...

But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis's tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. - Pat Metheny

For the full letter see http://www.apocalypse.org/~matthew/other/patm_keng/

[Bill Barton]

"I'm trying to make music a sensual expression, not an academic experiment." - Andrew Hill

"There are no natural barriers. It's all music. It's either hip or it ain't." - Lee Morgan

"Play as well as you can all the time, and if you're truthful to your thing, you'll succeed." - Lester Bowie

"If you want to make money in music, get into the band uniform business." - Henry Mancini

"To me, nostalgia is nothing more than a mindless plundering of the past for the commonplace." - Mel Torme

"In Africa I discovered what the true purpose of a musician is. We are historians, and it is our purpose to tell the people the true story of our past, and to extend a better vision of the future." - Randy Weston

"We all have music in us - your heartbeat is your drum, your voice is your sound - and music is supposed to put you in tune with nature." - Randy Weston

"Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction." - Max Roach

"I don't think of myself as a jazz musician but a medicine man." - Abdullah Ibrahim

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

"Music has many uses and I think the most perfected use that music has is one of a healing quality." - Ornette Coleman

"Music just may be the most powerful thing on the planet... You cannot exist without it. It can have a healing effect, conveyed in a spirit of love: it can communicate." - Kenny Barron

"The idea is more important than the style or the contents of the style you're trying to play in." - Ornette Coleman

"Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else's personality, that is not art." - Bennie Wallace

"External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument." - Yusef Lateef

"Improvisation is a musical statement of life itself." - Chico Freeman

"The music should be first, not the ego or the personality or the style." - Dewey Redman

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." - Charles Mingus

"Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion." - Duke Ellington

"I can see forms and shapes in my mind when I solo, just as a painter can see forms and shapes when he starts painting. And I can see different colors." - Elvin Jones

"It's always interesting to me that any time anyone hears something new they immediately have to categorize it or they don't feel comfortable. It's also one way not to experience something." - Dave Friedman

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas... I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

"Originality cannot be a goal. It is simply inevitable. The truly pathbreaking step can never be predicted, and certainly not by the person who makes it at the time he makes it. He clears as he goes, evolves his own techniques, devises his own tools, ignores where he must. And his path cannot be retraced, because each of us is an original being." - Harry Partch

"I never thought innovation as such was very important. Not when you have to think about it... If you're going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you'll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves." - Count Basie

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

"Art leaves something to the listener; that's what separates art from craft." - Henry Threadgill

"In the midst of creating, a person is raised to another level of consciousness that doesn't have that much to do with everyday thinking. It's as if you could imagine life before there were words." - Charlie Haden

"When I play I think of how the phrases move as a dance, or something in nature like a bird or a shooting star." - Don Cherry

"It's important for music to be pure - to be natural, to represent truth." - Don Cherry

"When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them." - Don Cherry

"You have your own perceptions as an artist because you're put on this planet to create mystery, but you're put here to unravel mysteries too." - Anthony Davis

"I really think of music very much in terms of math, geometry, parallel things, things in contrary motions, chunks that cross and weave, and I think that much of what we perceive in music and understand in music is really a kind of aural, multi-dimensional geometry: kind of flying in the air." - Maria Schneider

"The drum is surely the lord of music, is it not?" - Hsun Tzu (born ca. 312 BC)

"Music is the great arbiter of the world, the key to central harmony, and a necessary requirement of human emotion." - Hsun Tzu

"Without love there is no art. When the artist is playing beautifully there is no 'me"; there is love and beauty, and this is art. This is skill in action." - J. Krishnamurti

"Life is lived only once. And the less seriously the better." - Paul Bowles


"If sound is music and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound. If the sound is effective, it should actually have a chemical - some sort of physiological - effect on the listener, so he doesn't have to hear that sound again." - Keith Jarrett

"Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like 'new music,' 'avant-garde,' or something like that, I think it's like cutting out half the dictionary." - Archie Shepp

"You swing yourself into freedom. You don't block yourself into freedom. Everything derives in a circle." - Beaver Harris

"I think it's important every day to do exactly what you want to have happen from your instrument. Don't practice scales and arpeggios and patterns, but instead practice playing music. Play a song into a tape recorder and see if it makes musical sense. Does it warm you? Does it move you in any way?" - Michael Moore

"Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I'm concerned with retaining that process." - Bill Evans

"I am a free composer. In other words, I have no rules. There is no predisposition. I approach my writing the same way I approach my playing, my improvising. My writing IS improvising." - Sam Rivers

"We all have to open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to try and arrive at something new and different." - Horace Silver

"Music should use everything. The sadness of life and the fun of life. Anything that provokes a sound that is exciting is good." - Daniel Humair

"Technique has nothing to do with music... The question is what you do with it. I may have been able to do anything I wanted on the trumpet by high school, but that doesn't mean it was any good." - Ruby Braff

"I don't just write music to esthetically satisfy somebody. The reason I write music is that I feel it's a vehicle or channel which leads to your true self, your essence." - George Russell

Q: "What do you look for in a person to play with you?"
A: "His carriage first. His carriage of the instrument - you can tell whether he plays or not by the way he
carries the instrument, whether it MEANS something to him or not." - Miles Davis to Cheryl McCall

"The hardest thing for a musician to learn is how to play WITH people. That's what made the Basie rhythm section." - Jo Jones

"With music you can express any emotion, you can paint pictures..." - Sun Ra

"Improvised music is the most immediate and direct form of art, as it is the only one in which the listener becomes a participant in each event. Due to this fact, the music itself is only the acoustic materialization of an instant emotional and spiritual interaction among everyone present." - Eje Thelin

"All the music you've ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head. I don't reject that, I use it." - Don Pullen

"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

"I wanna calm people down, put 'em in sort of a dream state, between myth and reality. They just gotta learn to use their intuition. Intuition is a survival mechanism, innate knowledge of the proper thing to do." - Sun Ra

"Music can be the bridge to understanding, but people have to get some knowledge." - Sun Ra

"Music is only a means to an end - it is not the end. The concern is with the condition of man" - Abdullah Ibrahim

"The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it. If you're swept away by it you can't wait to do it again and the same magical moments always come." - Bobby Hutcherson

"To me, music is a study of life, a study of movement. And at this point, the inspiration for my music doesn't come from other music at all. It comes from things I see and hear in everyday life, or from very strong nature places that I've been to." - Bob Moses

"Music is not everything in life. If a young musician looks at it that way, then he can just play his instrument like putting a nail into a wall." - Joe Zawinul

"Music's the strongest force. It goes right to the energy seat of emotion." - Kirk Lightsey

"Musicians should never forget that we're blessed. We have a special gift that people can enjoy through us. We've had the good fortune to receive this and pass it along to others." - Ed Thigpen

"I think that the rhythm sections, drummers in particular, are the unsuing heroes of the music. It's the rhythm section that has changed the styles from one period to the other." - Max Roach

"All musical sounds that have been sounded on earth are still hanging in the atmosphere, like a canopy over the earth. You can recapture those sounds if you concentrate deep enough and have enough minds all traveling in the same direction." - Prince Lawsha

"You don't see the European classical musicians allowing the music of Bach, Brahms, or Beethoven to become extinct. That music has gone on for centuries and centuries. We have the same obligation. Why do we have to become so 'hip' that we can say, 'Bebop is square,' or "New Orleans is square'? This, to me, is a shame." - Rahsaan Roland Kirk

"Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul; all the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician." - John McLaughlin

"The symphonic orchestras have sponsors, people who give them endowments, and I think it should be the same way with jazz - because this is a national treasure." - Lee Morgan

"The drum is the heart of music. The saxophone can play and then rest, as can all of them except the drums; the drummer keeps going - he can't afford to stop." - Jo Jones

"The drum is the first instrument. Without it, you lose all the context." - Philip Wilson

"Rhythm archetypes are a mirror of natural laws and our being." - Reinhard Flatischler

"If you go back to the roots of jazz, it was all about COLLECTIVE improvisation." - Henry Threadgill

"The thing that is making jazz healthy today is that people are coming out of other backgrounds - from rock, folk, from ethnic music. It's changing the music, and for the better." - Billy Taylor

"Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz." - Sonny Rollins

"I don't separate one era of jazz from another, because I listen to everybody... Everybody takes from everybody else and adds their own thing and goes on from there." - Sonny Criss

"I would like to contribute in any kind of musical situation. There are so many colors in music, I won't choose one." - John Stubblefield

"I believe a good musician should be able to play in all kinds of company. I'll play Dixieland and I'll play free - whatever is needed, as long as the music has integrity. I love playing changes - like Johnny Griffin and Sonny Stitt - but I'll also play out when it fits. Any music, man, as long as it tells the truth." - Nathan Davis

"The hippest and the strongest tunes are blues, and we can't ever get away from the blues if we're going to call ourselves 'jazz' musicians. I have never heard a creative musician play modern Amercian music without hearing the blues." - Nat Adderley

"Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building." - Jimmy Rushing

"The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can't sing." - Billie Holiday

"All creative music is a little of what you FEEL and a little of what you KNOW." - (unknown)

"Express yourself! That's what the music is all about! That's why I got into the music." - Wilber Morris

"I'm interested in ENERGY. I love the feeling of being in a room and playing music with guys that are making ENERGY instead of just sound." - Buell Neidlinger

"Art is like the lifeguard of our society, because artists are the ones that create future realities." - Chick Corea

"Music, which is to me religion, and life, and love, and truth, is very important and it's a very serious kind of thing. It requires a bit of thought and quite a bit of sincerity." - Billy Harper

"Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents, there must be respect for the people that have gone before." - Jon Hendricks

"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 rippping it down and building something new." - Woody Shaw


"Time and rhythm are the most important elements in music. If both aren't well conceived, organized, and executed, no amount of notes will make the piece a meaningful artistic experience." - Anthony Davis

"...black music is a group music. That's why I don't like doing a solo saxophone thing: My feeling stems from rhythm, I really have to feel that rhythmic thing happening." - Jimmy Lyons

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

"You must believe in what you're doing and do that because you live what you love and you love what you live. Music is one of the arts that make a person completely naked." - Don Cherry

"Music is not only music - it's a force, like the ocean. It's sound, it's something that you put out there that never stops." - Bill Summers

"You need to make the music strong, and the philosophy behind the music has to be solid. What the music exudes, what it emits, has to be very strong. It's your thinking that brings you things in life. Part of my philosophy to exceed starts right there." - David S. Ware

"Music and dance amplify and make manifest to our senses the unheard tones and unseen waves that weave together the matter of existence." - Yaya Diallo from "The Healing Drum"

"When I look back at this period, the history of how the new music was created and functioned, I equate myself with Herbie Nichols, because they forced him out with no work. It happened to Billie Holiday - she died from no work. You kill a genius if you don't let him function. You can't be a genius in the kitchen at home. You are a genius but you're dying. Now I work a festival a year, two festivals a year out of maybe a thousand in the world. Five hundred in Europe. It makes me a little crazy, because I practice so hard not to die." - Sunny Murray interviewed by Dan Warburton in Fall 2001 Signal to Noise

"We must rededicate ourselves to the hope of world peace, human rights, and cosmic destiny. The challenge of creative music has never been more important than in periods of profound unrest and re-alignment." - Anthony Braxton (quoted by Mike Heffley in Signal to Noise, Issue 24, Winter 2002)

"This is America. You could walk into the Ritz Carlton stark naked with a million dollars under your arm, and they'll say, 'Yessir, how can I help you?' If anybody's shocked that the success of art in America is dependent on the dollar, they'd better wake up. This is the nature of America." - Hal Galper (quoted by Don Glasgo in Jazz Improv, Volume 3, Number 3)


"I am well aware that it is impossible for a human being to create anything that doesn't already exist. We become a center for (energy) to flow through. Once you get a view of the magic taking place all the time everywhere, then all you have to do is become an opening for that to come through... As soon as I put my hands on the piano, I'm in what people call an altered state - I go to another dimension instantly. And I'm often in that dimension anyway. The music that I hear is first of all, a kind of silent energy. As that translates into sound, it sounds more like a voice." - Joanne Brackeen

"It seems that nowadays the old spirit of the music is coming back around. I feel the same sense of urgency now as I did in the '60s and '70s. Maybe it smoothed out a bit in the '80s and '90s, but it's starting to happen again." - Dave Burrell quoted by Pete Gershon in STN #26.

[Bill Barton]

"The music is a vehicle of the soul.

And our souls hold the answer to the problems we've posed ourselves here.

When the music plays through me, I am healed, and so are others.

This is a beginning, and not just for me. When we see that all of our pain is about learning, and all of our anger and angst is just fear, we can start to heal, heal each other, heal the world.

Let's get busy. Not a lot of time to waste!"

Jessica Williams (from her website)

[Ron Thorne]

Bill Barton, you da man! Thanks again for such wonderful additions to this thread, my friend.

Now I'm a bit uneasy as to what I can add (if anything) without duplication. :-)

"Well, I ain't never heard no blues played like that!" - Cannonball Adderley on hearing John Coltrane

"He is an excellent drummer, but I would have preferred having him in my band later in his career, which I am sure will be a brilliant one." - John Dankworth

I'd love to know Dankworth's point of reference.

From a 1960 Playboy magazine feature on the subject of Narcotics And The Jazz Musician with a panel of several prominent jazz musicians, here's a wonderful retort from Nat Adderley to a comment from Dizzy Gillespie.

GILLESPIE: I've had addicts in my band. Once I was playing in a club in Chicago, and I walked down in the basement and I caught one of my musicians with a tie around his arm and a spoon on the table. I fired him immediately. Immediately! I said, "You get Out of here, get out of here right now!"

N. ADDERLEY: Maybe he was just going to eat some spaghetti.

Then, this one at the conclusion of the article:

N. ADDERLEY: I have the final solution. If you want to cut out all of the narcotics addiction and the whole problem, then let's don't be lenient on anybody. Take all the junkies, all the pushers, all the crooks, and throw them all in jail, and there'll be no narcotics problem at all.

HENTOFF: What do you suppose we'll all be on next?

N. ADDERLEY: Then we'll all start taking something else, like grass. Then they'll outlaw grass. Nobody will have a lawn!

Nat Adderley was not only a gifted musician, he was one funny cat, and one I'm delighted to have had a chance to hang with, if only briefly.

http://www.jazzhall.org/images/nadderly.jpg

[Alex]

"I always thought that making this kind of music, playing jazz, is a music not only of the spirit but of the body too. The body is very important. For me, I always like to play to a kind of end where you really don't know where you are anymore. Where the physics really have to give up, in a way."

- Peter Broetzmann

"My inspiration for making any type of music, anything, any attempt at anything, most of the time has nothing to do with music. I think art that is interesting is always connected with other elements. The aesthetics of art were never my starting point. If you asked me who my inspirations are in music, I would say more Marcel Duchamp than Igor Stravinsky. In a way, I’m more interested in the other arts, and activities other than music, as a basis for what I do."

- Misha Mengelberg

[Bill Barton]

Here’s Sonny Sharrock speaking of a gig in Oshkosh, Wisconsin with Herbie Mann:

“The promoters were a group of ladies, very nice and obviously very well off, who had rented a hall with the proceeds from the concert going to local charities. I didn’t expect them to enjoy what I was doing, but they didn’t seem to be enjoying Herbie’s flute solos, either, like audiences usually did. After the show, they came backstage and said, 'Well, that was very nice but we wish you had played some of your Tiajuana [sic] numbers.’ They thought Herbie was Herb Alpert!”

(from Bebop and Nothingness by Francis Davis)

[Jim Sangrey]

"Everybody I like is either dead or not feeling well" - Tom Waits, mid '70s

"Man, these changes are goin' by WAY too fast" - alleged comment by one acid-tripping NTSU One O'Clock Lab Band tenor saxophonist to another acid-tripping NTSU One O'Clock Lab Band tenor saxophonist in the middle of their Spring Concert duet feature on...............

"Freedom Jazz Dance"

Supposedly it's true......

[Bill Barton]

Ten reasons to keep playing this Music:


It's great fun.

It makes people happy.

It helps listeners feel their spirit, their soul, their center.

It helps musicians feel their spirit, their soul, their center.

It brings people together.

It heals the mind and the body.

It transcends ego.

It makes us part of the solution.

It moves civilization forward.

It speaks, in a tongue that is universal, of love, freedom, attainment, peace, and perfection.

(Jessica Williams from her website)

[bostontricky]

"One of the thing the band does...I don't know if you can tell what I'm doing...they never know what's going to happen next because I'm subject at a moment's notice to change the whole order of the arrangement...and keep things fluid that way but it also keeps them rather nervous."

Don Ellis, Live at Monterey, 1966.

[Bill Barton]

"This music reflects our disillusionment with the fundamental impulse of other modern, Western musics to organize nature, as represented in sound. We have a different way of dealing with so-called "chaos"; it is not our enemy, not even a matter to be fashioned into durable, self-validating human objects. We are "at play" with sound. Since our view is so dissident from normal assumptions, free improv cannot be expected to advance its players in the so-called music world of career and conquest. Try as we might! There are few of us who are acceptable in jazz clubs, few who have not cleared out coffee houses, to the consternation of the owners. The prejudice of our culture is towards structure-give us something, a token of structure, a name for the piece--that is what will validate the musician. The free players who have wide recognition outside the improv community are those who also play structured music, which is of course just fine, but it does instruct us about the preferences of our culture. We don't have any "best players" to offer, any more than a "best music". The improv that is classic has already been consumed by the present community of players; what is fresh is in process, and ready to be heard!"

Jack Wright

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

The love and respect for the creative impulse everywhere is what I'm after. I'm of American, Indian, African and English heritage, and I follow all those paths. I avoid the trap of easy definition. I try to deal with states beyond consciousness, with the element of chance, the element of magic.

-- Cecil Taylor

[Ron Thorne]

It’s been far too long since I contributed to this thread, which I highly value, so ...


From pianist/composer Bill Evans:


• “To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.”

• “Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.”

• “First of all, I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.”

• “My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.”

• “I believe in things that are developed through hard work. I always like people who have developed long and hard, especially through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think what they arrive at is usually a much deeper and more beautiful thing than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning. I say this because it’s a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to.”

• “A guy is influenced by hundreds of people and things, and all show up in his work. To fasten on any one or two is ridiculous. I will say one thing, though. Lennie Tristano’s early records impressed me tremendously. Tunes like ‘Tautology,’ ‘Marshmallow,’ and ‘Fishin’ Around.’ I heard the fellows in his group building their lines with a design and general structure that was different from anything I’d ever heard in jazz.”

• “Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, Forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.”

• “When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style…I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t’t even want to know about chords or anything - they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive…but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz…you must abstract the principles of music which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.”

• “It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.”

• “I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable. I feel its the only solution to that particular problem that I presented myself.”

• “Especially, I want my work–and the trios if possible–to sing.”

• “It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.”

• “I’m believe that all people are in possession of what might be called a ‘universal musical mind.’”

• “I’m . . . a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective.”

• “It’s like having a designer dress compared with one from Woolworth’s. Which one is more impressive when you go to the debutante ball?”

• “We use the people who are in the bullpen producing.”

• “There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician. (liner notes to Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’) ”

[Ron Thorne]

“Music washes away the dust of every day life.” - Art Blakey

“A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!” - Julian Cannonball Adderley

“If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music.” - Charles Mingus

“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” - Charles Mingus

“If there’s any such thing as a perfect man, I think John Coltrane was one. And I think that kind of perfection has to come from a greater force than there is here on earth.” - Elvin Jones

“(when asked how he and Coltrane’s group managed to play together with such intensity) You’ve got to want to die for the motherf**ker!” - Elvin Jones

“I’m not a star. I’ll never be a Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley or a Ray Charles. I’m just an imitator, man. I’m doing a very bad imitation on the bass of Jerry Jemmott, Bernard Odum, Jimmy Fielder, Jimmy Blanton, Igor Stravinsky, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, James Brown, Charlie Parker… the cats, man. I’m just backing up the cats. ” - Jaco Pastorius

“A chimpanzee could learn to do what I do physically. But it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life. ” - Jaco Pastorius

“So until we see you again, bright moments and keep searchin’ for your mystery note on the universal piano of life. ” - Rahsaan Roland Kirk

“I wish we could just stay on the bandstand, it’s so peaceful up here.” - Rahsaan Roland Kirk

“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

[Bill Barton]

"Music school? Are you kidding? I learned to play the sax in Pontiac Reformatory." - Mezz Mezzrow

"Dim these lights and make me 25 again!" - Von Freeman

[Bill Barton]

"...music, to me, is a beautiful language, a form of communication and self-expression that doesn't need to impress the critics or scare the audience half-to-death with pyrotechnical displays of daring-do... I'm not impressed by billions of notes, drummers who think they're Tony or Elvin (rest assured, they're not), bass players that play in the flute-register (come on...listen to Paul Chambers why dontcha?) and horn players that are more into fashion and posturing than into the music." - Jessica Williams

[Ron Thorne]

Damn, I wish Jessica would simply say what's on her mind and stop beating around the bush, Bill.

“I’ve never heard anything Wynton (Marsalis) played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me… He’s jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty.” - Keith Jarrett

“A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He’s above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.” - Herbie Hancock

“I don’t believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.” - Oscar Peterson

“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

And one of my alltime favorites, again from Monk:

“I’m famous. Ain’t that a bitch?”

[Bill Barton]

Originally posted by Ron Thorne
Damn, I wish Jessica would simply say what's on her mind and stop beating around the bush, Bill...

Ron, I know what you mean...

"Jazz is whatever you are... playing yourself, being yourself." - Mary Lou Williams

"If jazz is going to become healthy and vibrant into the 21st century, it needs to reject the elitist views that may have reflected American Culture fifty years ago, but have no place in modern civilization. These polarities never served us, merely diminished our freedom to grow creatively and spiritually." - Jessica Williams

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks, as always, for your excellent and timely contributions, Bill!

“I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing — even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.” - Thelonious Monk

“Monk was a gentle person, gentle and beautiful, but he was strong as an ox. And if I had ever said something about punching Monk out in front of his face - and I never did - then somebody should have just come and got me and taken me to the madhouse, because Monk could have just picked my little ass up and thrown me through a wall.” - Miles Davis

“Miles’d got killed if he hit me.” - Thelonious Monk

“We’re not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got ‘em, so they can keep ‘em.” - Miles Davis

[Samuel]

"Talent is cheap, and many talents treat themselves cheaply." -- Bill Evans

[Ron Thorne]

“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air, you can never capture it again.” - Eric Dolphy

“Let’s call it spirit, because to me, there is spirit in a reed. It’s a living thing, a reed, really, and it does contain spirit of a sort. And they say these areas make sound when the wind comes. It’s really an ancient vibration.” - Steve Lacy

“I try to listen attentively to musical sounds around me. You can think of the sounds of daily life as being musical. So I try to absorb the intricacies of the sounds as I would if I were listening to a piece of music. I try to see the beauty in everything.” - Tom Harrell

[Bill Barton]

Here are a couple of thought-provoking quotes from Tomasz Stanko:

"Strong melody can be a two-edged sword. Recognizable phrases can wear out eventually, lose their punch, replacing the charge of excitement with a familiarity which can evolve to drudgery and repulse rather than attract."

"How can a piece of music still surprise the ear which it has struck before? It must be something immediate, contained within the fabric of sound, not contrived ahead of time according to an ulterior motive."

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks for a couple of provocative additions on my birthday, Bill.

Some memorable quotes from guitarist Pat Metheny:

“My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.”

“It’s a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It’s becoming quantized, diced and defined. It’s becoming an idiom. To me if it’s anything, jazz is a verb – it’s more like a process than it is a thing.”

“(in reference to Kenny G’s overdubbing of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World") ‘When Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man (Louis Armstrong) who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’ tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible’”

“And if I ever DO see [Kenny G] anywhere, at any function — he WILL get a piece of my mind, and maybe a guitar wrapped around his head.”

[gdogus]

"Jazz is freedom. Now, you think about that." - Thelonious Monk

[Ron Thorne]

“Well, if I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn’t play like Wynton.” - Chet Baker

“Well, I’m too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I’m just gon’ keep playin’” - Clark Terry

“A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.” - Herbie Hancock

[Ron Thorne]

From a dear, departed friend:

"Improvisation... was not, for me, sitting in a row with ten other jokers playing the same thing. It was about expressing myself." - Jim Pepper

[Bill Barton]

On a lighter note for the New Year:

Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman: "Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't."

"If somebody don't open a window on this bus, we'll all get sophisticated." - Vido Musso

"Music is a very hard instrument." - Vido Musso

Jim Hall's comment to an overly "busy" colleague: "Don't just do something; stand there!"

"The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'" - (unknown-talking about the Don Ellis band)

"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken taken better care of myself!" - Eubie Blake

Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians: "We never play anything the same way once."

Red Kelly's sign for the bandstand at his Tacoma nightclub: "Go somewhere else and get discovered, and then come here."

These gems are all from Bill Crow's wonderful book "Jazz Anecdotes."

[Ron Thorne]

Many thanks for all of your wonderful contributions to this thread in its various incarnations, Bill.

I now have a copy of that delightful book from Bill Crow you referenced, thanks to a B&N gift certificate from my sons on my 60th birthday this past November.

“The very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid.” - Brad Mehldau

“Rather than simply say, I play jazz, I say I play music.” - Kenny Garrett

“Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.” - Ornette Coleman

[Bill Barton]

You're welcome, Ron! This is definitely my all-time favorite JC thread.

"Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one." - Duke Ellington

[Ron Thorne]

Bill, we must connect in Seattle one of these days!

At the risk of duplicating a quote already in place, here's another classic:

“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

http://www.alfanet.hu/kirk/img/rrk.jpg

Another ...

"God loves Black sound."

"Y'know, Music is a beautiful thing.
When I'm reincarnated, I'm gonna come back as a musical note!
That way can't nobody capture me.
They can use the hell out of me
but ain't nothin' too much they can do to me.
They can mess me up. They can play the wrong note.
They can play a C, but they can't really destroy a C.
All it is, is a tone.
So I'm gonna come back as a note!"
— Rahsaan Roland Kirk

[Bill Barton]

Ron, yes it would be great to hook up in Seattle... Any plans to get down this way soon? There's the Convergence Zone CD release party at Tula's on February 15th to consider.

Stretching the definitions a bit here for the following quote, which I pulled off one of the political activism lists I receive (no, she's not a "jazz cat.")

“Music is not a commodity, it’s a resource” -- Michelle Shocked

[graypencil]

Yeh Ron ..I second Bills idea!

Why dont you and Patti come
down for the CZ release stereo release orgies FEb 15 and 18th?
This band was so hard to herd together we decided we might as well do it
twice while we were at it ( 15th in SEattle @ Tulas 16th in Tacoma
@Jazzbones )

its USUALLY a bit warmer here than there ..:D

now:

mure musical drollery:


One night Lester Young was playing with a drummer that he really
didn't like. The drummer kept trying to be friendly all night and
finally trapped Lester at the bar after the gig, saying "I sure had a
good time tonight, Pres...I've been thinking, when was the last time
we
worked together?"

Lester's answer..."Tonight!"

*******************

"How can anyone seriously think they can conduct a symphony
orchestra if they've never listened to Tadd Dameron?" --Ran Blake.

******************

When Bill Evans was booked at Ronnie Scott's Club in London,
Ronnie decided they really ought to get a decent piano. They sold the
old one and set out to hire one from Steinway. It turned out that
they
didn't have a grand piano in stock but the German lady in charge
tried
to convince Ronnie that a small upright would be ideal because "Mr.
Evans could see the boys over the top".



*****************

When the Condon band was touring Britain, they naturally
enjoyed
the hospitality provided by local musicians. During one such party,
Eddie Condon spotted Bob Wilber listening avidly to a record and
talking
enthusiastically about it to his British friends. "Hey Wilber", he
shouted, "Quit making like a jazz fan!"



*****************

A reporter asked Zoot Sims what it had been like touring
Russia
with the Benny Goodman band. Zoot replied "Every gig with Benny is
like
playing in Russia". It was also during that tour that the notoriously
mean Goodman was persuaded, against his better judgment, to give some
small change to a starving child. This incident was filmed by Victor
Feldman who provided a great deal of amusement subsequently by
running
the film backwards so that it appeared that Benny was taking the
money
from the kid.



****************

Somebody wished Ruby Braff a Happy New Year. He turned on
them,
saying "Don't you tell me what sort of a New Year to have".



*****************

"I don't think you're gonna like the drummer."

"Oh really, how come?"

"He's busy man... real busy."

"How busy?"

"Busier than a cat tryin' to cover up shit on a marble
floor."

- Sweets Edison (?)



*********

Erroll Garner was occasionally teased because he couldn't
read
music.

"Hell, man," he once snapped back, "nobody can hear you
read."



***************

When he was with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock was backstage
at a
concert. The promoter had put out a large spread of food. Herbie went
up
to Miles and said "Miles! Check out all this food they have".

Miles said "I didn't come here to eat".



***************

Someone once asked Eubie Blake (when he was 97 years old)
"How
old do you have to be before your sex drive goes?"

Eubie said "You'll have to ask someone older than me".

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks for the invitation Bill and Phil. It's very tempting, I must say.

Phil, I was headed here to share those gems you forwarded to me today via e-mail, but you beat me to it. Thanks, buddy.

[Bill Barton]

Hi Ron,

I'm not really Phil's press agent or anything, just trying to get as many folks as possible to turn out for what promises to be a smokin' gig.

Hmmmm... Actually, I'm currently unemployed, so maybe he wants a press agent? I'm available, Phil.

From Arthur Taylor's Notes and Tones, Hampton Hawes responds to Taylor's question about the use of electronics in music:

"I'll tell you, man, I don't put nothing down. If somebody wants to play a cabbage, it's all right with me. But I'm going to stick to the wood, because those are my roots, that's the way I came up."

Cue the cabbage solo in here...

[Nate Dorward]

Of course, Hawes did use electric pianos later in his career... but no cabbages, at least.

[Bill Barton]

Or, to the best of my knowledge, rutabagas.

But we could certainly, at this point in time, appreciate a...

Walter Perkins suburban phone book solo, brushes only, please.

[Ron Thorne]

I'm diggin' the new posting style emerging here.

“If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music.” - Charles Mingus

“Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!” - Charles Mingus

“Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.” - Bill Evans

“My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.” - Bill Evans

[moneyp]

Originally posted by Bill Barton
Stretching the definitions a bit here for the following quote, which I pulled off one of the political activism lists I receive (no, she's not a "jazz cat.")

She did release a CD of Big Band/Swing type music, though.

Captain Swing (http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDSUB040401192339393184&sql=A0md7yl6jxpsb) (it was an earnest effort if not a particularly revelatory one).

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Bob Hope: "What do you think of Slim Gaillard?"
Marlene Dietrich: "Vout."

Although neither of them were jazz cats, I think Dietrich owned a jazz cat, a Synchopated Siamese.

[Bill Barton]

"When music is spiritual, when music is heavily spiritual, you just can't explain it. I don't have the words. Maybe Lester can explain it."

Malachi Favors, from Ted Panken's November 22, 1994 WKCR-FM interview with him and Lester Bowie.

Thanks to Pete C for posting the link to this interview over on "The Passing of Malachi Favors" thread.

And...

"The moon is set, the flowers they cry all day."

(from Malachi Favors' "immm" on Bap-Tizum by The Art Ensemble of Chicago)

[Ron Thorne]

Timely and beautiful, Bill.

“To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.” - Bill Evans

[Bill Barton]

"We are star-stuff, we are one vibration in a standing wave, and it doesn't matter if it's called god or goddess or Allah or Aum or Chi or Orgone. It's gravity and light-years and galaxies colliding and little kittens and bodily love and that chill you get when you listen to great music or see a great painting or hear the sounds of the forest."

Jessica Williams from her essay on John Coltrane (she was listening to A Love Supreme when she wrote this.)

[Bill Barton]

"Curiosity may have killed the cats, but wolves thrive on it... curiosity triggers off ongoing research and it is indeed a very strong motivator. Have you ever visited a pigeon-hole? It must be pretty dark and narrow inside, and certainly not a place to dwell upon, so I can‘t imagine spending a lifetime in such a prison!"

John Wolf Brennan

[Ron Thorne]

"Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yourself." - Miles Dewey Davis, Jr.

“Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.” - Art Blakey

“Well, if I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn’t play like Wynton.” - Chet Baker

[Lazy River]

Japanese jazz fans? They know more about me than I know about myself.
--Donald "Duck" Bailey

It sure is a nice feeling to know that people will remember you after you've gone--that
you'll manage to be a little bit of history.
--Sarah Vaughan

You have to remember that we play this music for people and not just to be off in some
corner separated from everybody else. It's for the people.
--Jack DeJohnette

when I get to heaven gonna play on my harp
gonna play all over god's heaven
but only with the cats who can make the changes
--Abdullah Ibrahim

All music's gotta be 'folk' music: I ain't never heard no horse sing a song.
--Louis Armstrong

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks for the additions, Lazy River.

“For me, the main thing is spontaneity and taking chances. You have to study and know the traditions, but then you have to play things that haven’t been played before. It becomes a balance of knowing the tradition and using your own original voice to add to it.” - Dave Kikoski

“Well, I’m too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I’m just gon’ keep playin'” - Clark Terry

“There is no such thing as a wrong note.” - Art Tatum

“Look, you come in here tomorrow, and anything you do with your right hand I’ll do with my left. [to Bud Powell]” - Art Tatum

“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air, you can never capture it again.” - Eric Dolphy

http://www.cootiesjazz.com/images/musicians/dolphy.jpg

Eric Dolphy, during the recording of
Out to Lunch, 1964 .
- photograph by Francis Wolff

[Lazy River]

On jazz improvisation: "...a gathering together of all the evidence you have of how to resolve going from here to here to here."
--Dizzy Gillespie

On Clifford Brown: "The technique, the ideas, the sound, everything is there. He roars through the changes, leaving ashes in his wake."
--from THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPET by Bill Moody

"Nothing and no one exists in a vacuum. Somebody is always influenced by someone else."
--Hank Jones

"Music is like honor and pride, free from defect, damage, or decay."
--Duke Ellington

"That's what jazz is. It's exploration in public."
--Jack Kelson

"You begged me for this piano and you wanted to take lessons, so you're going to keep on. You'll thank me for this one day."
--Horace Silver's father

[Dibble]

JAZZ music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
Francoise Sagan French Novelist, Playwright

A JAZZ musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.Benny Green

I googled it..here (http://www.hi-ho.ne.jp/maxi/pr3.html)

[Bill Barton]

"I'll play it first and figure out what it's called later."

Miles Davis


"The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen."

Duke Ellington


"In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."

Charles Mingus


"Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside you, and take some of you with it when it leaves."

Henry Threadgill


"The music has generated all the techniques I use. When I sit down to learn to play something . . . it is not because I want to master a technique. It is because I want to hear what an idea sounds like."

Pat Martino


"What we play is life."

Louis Armstrong


"If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterwards."

Joe Pass

[pollo loco]

"If somebody don't open a window on this bus, we'll all get sophisticated."
--Vido Musso

[Uli]

"Hey, you're playing my note. Get off my note!" (unknown section player)

[Mike Schwartz]

I've got a whole bunch taped from some 300+ archived interviews...

One that I recall puting up on the old JC was the answer from Jimmy Heath to a question about his experiences of playing, performing and composing in all the Bop styles and developments over the decades....


"ALL Bop is HARD"!

Another good one from Mr. Heath was regarding his extensive teaching experiences, and I asked something about how he helped students develop an original sound:

"If it were easy, everyone would do it....you know the tune 'Send In the CLONES'?"

[Bill Barton]

"In the words of Toru Takemitsu, we're all 'confronting silence.' I think that, with respect for our differences, there is a growing awareness that all music comes from the same place."

Dave Douglas

[Bill Barton]

Originally posted by Mike Schwartz
I've got a whole bunch taped from some 300+ archived interviews...

One that I recall puting up on the old JC was the answer from Jimmy Heath to a question about his experiences of playing, performing and composing in all the Bop styles and developments over the decades....


"ALL Bop is HARD"!

Another good one from Mr. Heath was regarding his extensive teaching experiences, and I asked something about how he helped students develop an original sound:

"If it were easy, everyone would do it....you know the tune 'Send In the CLONES'?"

These are great, Mike! More, please...

[Lois Gilbert]

I don't know if these are repeats (I think several are) but I just received them in an email and thought I would pass them on:


Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one." - DukeEllington


Rather than simply say, I play jazz, I say I play music. - Kenny Garrett

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

Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman: "Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't."


"If somebody don't open a window on this bus, we'll all gsophisticated." - Vido Musso

"Music is a very hard instrument." - Vido Musso


Jim Hall's comment to an overly "busy" colleague: "Don't just do something; stand there!"

"The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'" - (unknown-talking about > the Don Ellis band)

"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken taken better care of myself!" - Eubie Blake

Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians: "We never play anything the same way once."

Red Kelly's sign for the bandstand at his Tacoma nightclub: "Go somewhere
else and get discovered, and then come here."

"Improvisation was not, for me, sitting in a row with ten other jokers
playing the same thing. It was about expressing myself." - Jim Pepper

"If I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn't play like Wynton. - Chet Baker

"I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gon' keepplayin'. - Clark Terry

A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and
whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students
creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.- Herbie Hancock

"Jazz is freedom. Now, you think about that." - Thelonious Monk

Some memorable quotes from guitarist( Pat Metheny) :

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.?
It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's
becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's
anything, jazz is a verb - it's more like a process than it is a thing.
(in reference to Kenny Gs overdubbing of Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World")
When Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man (Louis Armstrong)
who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass,
jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis'
tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have
imagined possible ,and if I ever DO see [Kenny G] anywhere, at any function, he
WILL get a piece of my mind, and maybe a guitar wrapped around his head.

Here are a couple of thought-provoking quotes from Tomasz Stanko:

"Strong melody can be a two-edged sword. Recognizable phrases can wear out
eventually, lose their punch, replacing the charge of excitement with a
familiarity which can evolve to drudgery and repulse rather than attract."

"How can a piece of music still surprise the ear which it has struck before?
It must be something immediate, contained within the fabric of sound, not
contrived ahead of time according to an ulterior motive."

When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air, you can never capture it again.- Eric Dolphy

Let's call it spirit, because to me, there is spirit in a reed. It's a living thing, a reed,
really, and it does contain spirit of a sort. And they say these areas make sound
when the wind comes. It's really an ancient vibration.- Steve Lacy

I try to listen attentively to musical sounds around me. You can think of
the sounds of daily life as being musical. So I try to absorb the intricacies
of the sounds as I would if I were listening to a piece of music.
I try to see the beauty in everything.? - Tom Harrell

"Talent is cheap, and many talents treat themselves cheaply." -- Bill Evans

I say play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what you
want and let the public pick up on what you're doing even if it does take
them fifteen, twenty years. -Thelonious Monk

Monk was a gentle person, gentle and beautiful, but he was strong as an ox.
And if I had ever said something about punching Monk out in front of his face
- and I never did - then somebody should have just come and got me and taken
me to the madhouse, because Monk could have just picked my little ass up and
thrown me through a wall. - Miles Davis

Miles'd got killed if he hit me.? - Thelonious Monk

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues.
They got 'em, so they can keep 'em. - Miles Davis

[Ron Thorne]

It's been too long since this thread received some impetus, so ...

“The best thing you can do is to be a woman and stand before the world and speak your heart.” - Abbey Lincoln

“The louder they play (the band) the softer I sing.” - Joe Williams

“How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don’t you ask him? And besides, maybe we’d all like to be like Miles, and just haven’t got the guts.” - Dizzy Gillespie

“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” - Dizzy Gillespie

“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” - Charles Mingus

“There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.” - Stan Getz

[Capt.W./TX.]

One time in Dallas in early 1961, I went to a Dave Brubeck concert at SMU.

Afterward, there was a 'meet the artist' reception at the nearby student center, I got to speak to Brubeck-probably the kindest, most caring and accessible of all jazz people I've ever met.

I asked him what he thought of various other pianists. When I mentioned Cecil Taylor, he was very interested. Brubeck said that he'd gone out of his way to go hear Taylor play live a time or two, then uttered one of the most
simple, yet profound, statements I've ever heard from anybody in this music:

"Anytime you're going to do anything really different in music, it's going to be at the expense of something else".

[Ron Thorne]

"Anytime you're going to do anything really different in music, it's going to be at the expense of something else".
With no reflection whatsoever on Cecil Taylor, thanks so much for that contribution, Capt.W./TX.

[Ron Thorne]

<dl> <dt>A few classics from Duke Ellington:
</dt> </dl>
"I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues."

"A problem is a chance for you to do your best."

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

"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it."

“What is music to you? What would you be without music? Music is everything. Nature is music (cicadas in the tropical night). The sea is music, the wind is music. The rain drumming on the roof and the storm raging in the sky are music. Music is the oldest entity. The scope of music is immense and infinite. It is the ‘esperanto’ of the world.”

“I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.”

Now that I've read his autobiography, I'll be able to cull many more gems from this extraordinary man.
<dl>
<dt>
</dt> <dd>
</dd> </dl>

[Ron Thorne]

Holy crap, this thread is growing mold. My apologies for not adding anything for so long. Summer in The Land of the Midnight Sun and all ...

Here are a few from the venerable Elvin Jones:

• Music is a way of life, it's everything. I play drums and that's what I believe I was born to do. (Down Beat Oct 2 69 p 12)

• Thad told me this many years ago and it got to me when he said it. He probably doesn't even remember saying it to me. He just said, 'Whenever you play, imagine that it's the very last chance or opportunity you'll ever have.' So just that thought is enough incentive to at least not be wishy-washy or do something insignificant. At least it will bring out whatever honesty is in you to be applied to your instrument at that time. That's the only philosophy I know -- just to do the very best you can at all times. (Down Beat Oct 2 69 p12)

• It's the honesty you apply to your playing that makes music enjoyable. The style of the music has little to do with it. It's only honesty makes it beautiful. (Melody Maker Dec 19 72 p16)

• I like Ornette, but Coltrane to me, at least after my brothers, my mother and father, was the best teacher I had. The communication was there, the rapport was there. If anything, it was a relationship of mentor and pupil. (Down Beat Mar 27 75 p25)

• Playing is not something I do at night. It's my function in life.

Amen~

[Richardo Caerleoni]

There was an anecdote Art Blakey used to tell about a young (then) fashionable and fast trumpet player (Donald Byrd?) begging Monk for a chance to play on a record date with him in the 50s…Eventually Monk totally loses patience, turns to him and says ,”OK, So… Doing What?”

Also, Art Pepper’s remark re. Phil Woods… “Hell, he wanted to be so much like Bird, he even married his old lady”. (Not fair on Phil W. or Chan but it made me smile.)

(Jazz) Critic to Ronnie Scott..."You just have to hear this guy, he plays tenor like no-one else"....Scott..."So, he puts the bell in his mouth?"

[Ron Thorne]

On guitarist Freddie Green:

http://www.craftone.co.jp/solo_flight/guitarist/green,f/green,f_ph.gif

Bassist George Duvivier speaking about the guitar's role in a rhythm section: The misappropriation of musical space or intrusive repetition of roles that upset the soloist's flow of ideas sometimes also interfere with the formulation of parts within the rhythm section. "Some guitarists can absolutely smother the rhythm section by playing 'chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk', four beats to every measure," George Duvivier remarks. "They should play occasional fills or break the line up, because you have a drummer and a pianist. So you don't really need everyone playing on the beat like this. What they are trying to do is to imitate Freddie Green with Basie's band, but there's an art to that. Freddie Green does it without getting in the way. He's supporting, not drowning out, the others. You can always hear the bass and drums when he plays."


Ira Gitler:

"A musician has to have something to be recognized despite the fact that he is not a soloist, and Freddie Green has it".

Source: Quotation from liner notes on the original album 'Basie Reunion', 1958, reissued and remastered 2000 on Prestige, OJCCD -1049 -2 (P-7147)

[AntManBee]

Ron, too bad I don't have much to contribute to this thread because I really appreciate it!

[Ron Thorne]

Ron, too bad I don't have much to contribute to this thread because I really appreciate it!
Your last post was a valuable contribution, my friend.

Thanks.

[AntManBee]

Actually, I came to think of one quote that might qualify here, by Swedish piano player Jan Johansson:

"There must be a way to play the C note that makes people break down."

[Richardo Caerleoni]

Swedish piano player Jan Johansson:

"There must be a way to play the C note that makes people break down."


Great line & great piano player...although I thought he was Danish.
Only a bridge away.

Whatever, I have now stolen it!

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks, AntManBee. To be honest, finding quotes from or about jazz musicians is not an easy task. They're often quite elusive and hard-to-find.

Here are a few more gems from Charles Mingus:

"Our nights didn't begin until after noon. Because in the old days, you'd start Birdland at 8:30 or 9 pm and play until 4 in the morning. Then you'd go out to the corner and talk to a couple of musicians - I used to talk to Oscar Pettiford a whole lot - you'd stand there till 7, 8 or 9, or else go down to the jam session at Minton's."

On 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat': "That was for Lester Young. I was playing the Half Note Club the night we heard he died and we went to the bandstand and played a Blues for Lester. I knew the guys would never do that again. I went home and wrote a blues the way I thought they were playing, with different types of chord changes - not just the regular blues - and it became part of the book."

"I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient."

From our own Bob Brookmeyer:

"A jazz man should be saying what he feels. He's one human being talking to others, telling his story - and that means humor and sadness, joy, all the things that humans have."

And I love this one from Shelly Manne:

"We never play anything the same way once."

[Richardo Caerleoni]

Ron - I had forgotten that Shelly Manne quote!...... Brilliant!

Didn't Lenny Bernstn. say to him " Hey, Shelly you played great Blues (sic) drums on that!"..and Shelly said, "Lenny, you just stick to writing musicals and I'll stick to playing drums!"

[Ron Thorne]

I'm not hip to any such exchange between Leonard Bernstein and Shelly Manne, but that's neither here nor there. If such an exchange actually took place, I would think it more likely involved (the unrelated) Elmer Bernstein, since both he and Shelly were west coast residents, and Elmer wrote numerous film scores.

[AntManBee]

Whatever, I have now stolen it!

I use it too from time to time. It is a great line for sure.
And I agree, the Shelly Manne quote is excellent!

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Hardening of the categories leads to art disease.

-- Harry Holtzman, who was actually an abstract painter cat, but I found it in a Bob Moses album ;)

[Ron Thorne]

"I didn't even bother to listen to it afterwards. Got through playing it, packed up my horn and walked out." - Coleman Hawkins

(on his legendary recording of "Body and Soul")

"I would like to play for audiences who are not using my music to stimulate their sex organs." - Ornette Coleman

[Ron Thorne]

http://www.soulwalking.co.uk/%A5Artist%20GIF%20Images/Ray-Brown-100.jpg

"The better it gets, the fewer of us know it." - Ray Brown

"[Thelonious] Monk is a subject in itself. I mean, most piano players in most big bands sit down and they play with the band, you know. But Monk would just sit there like this. And all of a sudden there'd be a pause from all the trumpets and everything and Monk would go 'plink!' like that. And everybody would go 'Yeah!'" - Ray Brown

http://www.musicclub.it/luglio2001/images/WAYNE%20SHORTER.jpg

"Clouds float in the same pattern only once." - Wayne Shorter

http://www.batucadas1000.com.br/imagens/paredao/biografias/max_roach.jpg

"Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty." - Max Roach

[Ron Thorne]

http://www.alfanet.hu/kirk/img/rrk.jpg



"That's what freedom's all about -- learnin' somethin' then throwin' it away." - Roland Kirk





"I had to go to the movies and pay
the price to see Diana Ross
mess up Lady Day
Damn! That was a helluva price to pay
That broad's so skinny
You can put her in a violin case!
Damn, what a terrible waste!

She was doin' alright
when she was singin' with The Supremes
Why'd she have to go and mess up
my Lady Day Dreams?"

- Rahsaan Roland Kirk, "Clickety Clack"

[Mike Schwartz]

I'll try to consolidate this story...
I had the bassist/composer Steve Swallow live via phone on my weekly program yesterday.

We got towards the end of our talk when I mentioned to him how funny I found many of his song titles, and that prior to his appearance I played the tune "Bite Your Grandmother" from one of his recordings, not only because I loved the tune, but think it's among one of his really funny song titles.

Swallow tells me that he writes his music first and the titles find thier way afterwards, as opposed to those who make up a title inspired by something or other and then move forward to writing the music.

The inspiration for this particular title is that Steve Swallow found a quote from John Phillip Sousa, who when asked what he thought of jazz replied, "It makes me feel like biting my grandmother!"

Thankyou Mr. Steve Swallow, and John Phillip Sousa!

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

LOL! Great story, Mike!

[Ron Thorne]

Great anecdote, Mike! I love Steve Swallow's work, beginning in his early years with Gary Burton.

[Ron Thorne]

Man, have I neglected this thread far too long!

I could use some help with some additional quotes, too. Thanks.

"It's very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he's creating, the fact that he's experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we're in a brotherhood of some kind...we're in it together." - Chick Corea

"I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was." - Paul Desmond

"I am not a blues singer. I am not a jazz singer. I am not a country singer. But I am a singer who can sing the blues, who can sing jazz, who can sing country." - Ray Charles

"Wrong is right." - Thelonius Monk

[Uli]

"There are musicians who say

I'm too far from people,

but e v e r y w h e r e I go

people be smilin',

clappin' their hands

and they're happy.

So it's N O T T O O F A R O U T,

because people are listening and they

might not know the music but they connect with

what I'm doing and that speaks for itself.

In every nation same reaction.

In A m e r i c a t o o, at l e a s t it

took them a long time to
wake up.

The teenagers and the sub-teenagers

they are waking up. I played
in
a teenage club

called the Knitting Factory and

people there were amazed

with what happened."

Sun Ra

[Ron Thorne]

Man, here's one after my own heart.

"When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They're the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created." - Gerald Early


"If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked." - Miles Davis

[Ron Thorne]

"Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night." - Count Basie

"The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it’s still a melody." - Stan Getz

"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock

Words to live by, Herbie. That philosophy has been an integral part of my mission with young people for many years.

[dow30]

Great thread, Ron!

Not a "Jazz Cat" but great quote just the same:

"It does not matter whether the cat is black or white, only that it catches mice" Deng Xiaoping, Chinese political leader, 1904-1998.

[dow30]

"I got a simple rule about everybody. If you don't treat me right, shame on you." - Louis Armstrong

[JHMurray]

"People don't know what they like. They only like what they know"

-Ellis Marsalis

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks, dow30.

Welcome, JHMurray, and thanks for the additions from each of you.

This is the 2nd incarnation of this thread idea, and one I enjoy greatly. Glad you do, too.

A few more:

"I like Ornette, but Coltrane to me, at least after my brothers, my mother and father, was the best teacher I had. The communication was there, the rapport was there. If anything, it was a relationship of mentor and pupil." - Elvin Jones

“Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate upon it in order to get the most of it. You must absorb most of it. The harmonies within the music can relax, soothe, relax, and uplift the mind when you concentrate upon and absorb it. Jazz music stimulates the minds and uplifts the souls of those who play it was well as of those who listen to immerse themselves in it. As the mind is stimulated and the soul uplifted, this is eventually reflected in the body.” - Horace Silver

“I wish we could just stay on the bandstand, it’s so peaceful up here.” - Roland Kirk

[dow30]

From Jim Pierce’s “Big Golden Trumpet Encyclopedia”

VALUES

THE GREATEST HANDICAP – FEAR
THE BEST DAY – TODAY
EASIEST THING TO DO – FIND FAULT
MOST USELESS ASSET – PRIDE
THE GREATEST MISTAKE – GIVING UP
THE GREATEST STUMBLING BLOCK – EGOTISM
THE GREATEST COMFORT – WORK WELL DONE
MOST DISAGREEABLE PERSON – THE COMPLAINER
WORST BANKRUPTCY – LOSS OF ENTHUSIASM
BEST TEACHER – ONE WHO MAKES YOU WANT TO LEARN
GREATEST NEED – COMMON SENSE
MEANEST FEELING – REGRET AT ANOTHER’S SUCCESS
BEST GIFT – FORGIVENESS
GREATEST KNOWLEDGE – GOD
GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD – LOVE

SUGGESTION: Put These Values As Pin Up In Your Practice Room

[JHMurray]

Miles in an old Downbeat interview:

"Yeah, I like Roberta Flack, but if Al Green had one tit, I'd marry that muthaf***er"

I know, not exactly words we can all live by, but it's so classically Miles.

[Uli]

Jim Baker in the liner's to his new solo album (free solo piano and analog synthesizer):

"This recording may, to some unknown extent, have involved factors related to specific proximities of the time and place of their creation, and might also have involved factors which might appear to be random (please note however, that I am not claiming either that such factors would involve randomness, nor am I attesting a belief in the existence of true randomness as a phenomena observable in nature or elsewhere) and thus, any such results might well be irreproducable (or irreproducable by me, at least)

(I think if I was ever to do another one of these solo recordings, maybe I would just stick to standards)
:



"

[Ron Thorne]

"We've got instruments that are computer-generated. They play perfect. But did you ever hear anyone cry in tune? Make love in tune? We've got the whole spectrum to deal with, but we go and de-spectrum ourselves. I'm downsizing to maximize the creative part. Working on being more spiritual, so that the music has power. Not military power. Damn that. But power where the note is still going on after I stop playing. The note is still going inside of the people when they walk out of the room."

- Hamiet Bluiett, from interview in Santa Cruz Sentinel, Aug. 8, 2002

[Doc Martin]

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

[Ron Thorne]

"There's suddenly a lot of pressure to do music from 'in the tradition'. But the truest homage to Charlie Parker, for example, isn't to play his tunes or play just like him, but to...play something new that wouldn't be possible without Charlie Parker's example. The most vital contribution you can make to furthering the jazz tradition is to create your own music, create a new music." - Anthony Davis [January, 1982]

[old student]

“Jazz is an art form whose risks are great and rewards are subtle”
- Don Grolnick

Jim Hall to an overplaying guitarist:
"Don't just do something -- stand there!"

"MrKnobs" posting on harmony-central site:
It's kinda like a band I was in one time: one guy suggested every time we find a better musician that wants to do our stuff we hire him and get rid of the lamer guy. Trouble with that idea is, yeah, we'd eventually have a kick ass band, but none of us would be in it.

[dex68]

"If it sounds good, it is good." - Duke Ellington

[Ron Thorne]

"When it comes to the public, I put it out there and ask, how many different ways can you feel about something? Do you have freedom of emotion, do you have freedom of feel, or is it Pavlov's salivation formula? You're only moved by what you're programmed to be moved by. For those people who say, 'I only like this or that played this way,' my only question is, how much can you feel? How much can you really feel?" - Wayne Shorter [1998]

[Bill Barton]

Joe Locke talking with Jason West from the November 2005 print edition of All About Jazz - Seattle regarding playing 12 hours a day on the streets of NYC with the legendary multi-instrumentalist George Braith:

"Oh man, it was a really deep time spiritually. It was a really formative time. It let me know that I was capable of going beyond what I thought I was capable of. That as a personn, as a human being, I could actually do more than I ever thought possible..."

And Locke continues:

"...We're living in a society where our culture is getting more divided between the haves and the have-nots and finding music that is by of and for the people is becoming too expensive for the people to enjoy... I think that music is supposed to be for all the people who want it, not just the people who are fortunate enough to be wealthy."

_________________________________________________________________

Can I have an "amen," please?

[Ron Thorne]

Amen~

Thanks for resurrecting this thread, Bill. It's much appreciated, my friend.

"Maybe the most important commitment you can make is to the music fan that lives inside of you, to find out just what it is about music that knocks you out. In that discovery, you’ll find most of what you need to know to take you wherever you need to go." - Pat Metheny, Commencement address at Berkelee, May/96



And, for some contrast in styles:

"The Lord didn't stop giving out talent with Duke Ellington...Wynton think's he's the end. But why do we only have to play Duke? You've got to bring something to the table." - Betty Carter (profiled by Marc Fisher in the Washington Post)


"I don't need time. What I need is a deadline!"

"I'm sure critics have their purpose, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did." - Duke Ellington

[Bill Barton]

Amen~


You're welcome, Ron, it's (as you may know already) my all-time favorite JC thread. No mo' for now, but keep on keepin' on (now, who the heck said that?)

[Ron Thorne]

Jazz is an intensified feeling of nonchalance. -- Françoise Sagan

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport festival. -- Miles Davis

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play. -- Dizzy Gillespie

I don't care too much about music. What I like is sounds. -- Dizzy Gillespie

I've never heard anything Wynton (Marsalis) played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me…He's jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty. - Keith Jarrett

[Ron Thorne]

OK, I'm on a roll . . .

The outer space beings are my brothers. They sent me here. They already know my music. -Sun Ra

I was very happy and secure until I went into the army. Then I started to feel there was something I should know that I didn't know. -Bill Evans

I don't expect people who listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to come hear me. I accept that reality. -Cecil Taylor

[makpjazz57]

You're welcome, Ron, it's (as you may know already) my all-time favorite JC thread. No mo' for now, but keep on keepin' on (now, who the heck said that?)


Ron, thanks for starting this thread and kind of reviving it. I've already passed along the majority of it to friends/family. I think this is a great document of wonderful quotes/statements for those who teach music to share with his/her students, too!

Marla

[Doc Martin]

Two from Billy Holiday:

“When Lester plays, he almost seems to be singing; one can almost hear the words.”

"I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.”

And one from Bird:

“Master your instrument, Master the music, and then forget all that shit and just play.”

[makpjazz57]

And one from Bird:

“Master your instrument, Master the music, and then forget all that shit and just play.”


Wonderful!!!

Thanks,
Marla

[Ron Thorne]

Ron, thanks for starting this thread and kind of reviving it. I've already passed along the majority of it to friends/family. I think this is a great document of wonderful quotes/statements for those who teach music to share with his/her students, too!

Marla

Cool, Marla.

This thread (like its predecessor on the "old" JC) is a labor of love. In fact, I have a fabulous book on my Christmas wish list, which, if received, will keep me busy for months adding to this thread.

In the meantime . . .

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

Playing "bop" is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing. -Duke Ellington

I don't want no drummer. I set the tempo. -Bessie Smith

[frank m]

"If you don't hit one now and then, you're not really trying"

Kenny Davern

[makpjazz57]

I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them. -- Ira Gershwin

Honey, in this business you've always got to get there the firstest with the mostest and the newest. -- Chick Webb

If Billie Holiday hadn't existed, I probably wouldn't have, either. -- Carmen McRae

Is that child singing or am I dreaming? -- Earl Hines on hearing Sarah Vaughan for the first time.

I remember you in Chicago when you were sitting under Jimmy Noone trying to learn something. Now your head's got fat. -- Louis Armstrong talking to Benny Goodman

If anyone comes up to me and says, "Oh I just love your 'Begin the Beguine,", I want to vomit. Artie Shaw

All of these came from a huge coffee table book titled The American Songbook.

Marla

[John P. Cooper]

"I think I'll go back to art once this music thing blows over." ~ Duke Ellington

[claude]

“I predict that people will be playing jazz for quite awhile and as long as they are there will be some who do perverted things with it. And that can only be a good thing!” - Ellery Eskelin


“One has to learn to deal with tradition. Those who make it a fetish and worship it like a Golden Calf demote themselves willingly to the ranks of museum attendant or antique dealer and will never get beyond mere celebration of smooth and polished nostalgia. Those, however, who think that they can ignore or even negate tradition altogether are moving in a vacuum without history and hence create hermetic works which only a handful of insiders can decipher.” - Tom Gsteiger, liner notes to “Forms” by Ellery Eskelin

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks for those excellent additions, claude.

I wish everyone who eschews recordings by "dead" jazz musicians would read Tom Gsteiger's insightful remarks above.

[pollo loco]

when I get to heaven gonna play on my harp
gonna play all over god's heaven
but only with the cats who can make the changes
--Abdullah Ibrahim

[Ron Thorne]

Damn, it's nice to see you posting here again, pollo!


Tastes are created by the business interests. How else can you explain the popularity of Al Hirt? -Charles Mingus

The outer space beings are my brothers. They sent me here. They already know my music. -Sun Ra

[Bill Barton]

"His scraps were my vittles."

- Steve Lacy on Cecil Taylor (quoted by Francis Davis in Outcats)

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"...film noir, Mahalia Jackson's moan, and the midnight world of dreams. These have been the chief influences on my music."

- Ran Blake in Outcats :cool:

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"...I don't think you have to like art. You have to respond to it."

- Borah Bergman in Outcats :eek:

[Ron Thorne]

I like the girls to match the upholstery of the car. -Charlie Barnet

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 (to arranger Nelson Riddle)

I don't mind being the butt of a joke-if it's a funny joke. -Kenny G.

Funny is as funny does, Ken. -Fadda

[RedJazz]

"He put his horn to his lips and what came out was like the sound of a girl saying yes." - Eddie Condon on first hearing Bix Beiderbecke

[RedJazz]

"Jazz is not playing a tune the same way once" Shelley Manne's definition of jazz

[Arcturus]

He could joke, and he had nicknames for most of the guys. He used to call me "Bucket," because my head was a little larger than normal. I called him "Coaltruck."(Ray Bryant)

He use to call Art Taylor "Brushmouth," because of his big moustache.(Steve Kuhn) on Coltrane