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.

"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