Jazz Quotes

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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

If you think about it, bebop is avant-garde to those people playing swing. Let us also remember that the earliest of jazz was also avant-garde in relation to everything that had gone before it. So we are dealing with a form that in itself is avant-garde.
-Ken Burns

“Master your instrument, Master the music, and then forget all that *!xy!@ and just play.”
-Charlie Parker

“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.”
-Duke Ellington

“If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it.”
-Louis Armstrong

“Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.”
-Louis Armstrong

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
-Miles Davis

“At least one day out of the year all musicians should just put their instruments down, and give thanks too Duke Ellington.”
-Miles Davis

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
-Louis Armstrong

We all do 'do, re, mi', but you have to find the other notes yourself.
-Louis Armstrong

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.
-Louis Armstrong

It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.
-Duke Ellington

“There are wonderful things in real jazz, the talent for improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.”
-Henri Matisse

“Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.”
-John Phillip Sousa

“Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul”
-Paul Whiteman

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

You must be willing and able to play anything, no matter how absurd it may seem to you, at the moment of conception, with no consideration of whether it will be liked or disliked, good or bad, without fear of making mistakes.
-Bobby Shew

Let you inner self or feelings flow through the horn.
-Bobby Shew

I think there are only three things America will be known for 2, 000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball.
-Gerald Early

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.
-Isadora Duncan

When I was a little kid I thought I would grow up to be black and sing jazz in nightclubs.
-Molly Ringwald

There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.
-Pat Metheny