Dizzy Gillespie

They’re not particular whether you’re playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds.

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

Always keep reaching.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn’t about standing still and being safe.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.

Jazz music grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath.

Hipness is not a state of mind, it’s a fact of life.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

I remember Glenn Miller coming to me once, before he had his own band, saying, How do you do it? How do you get started? It’s so difficult. I told him, I don’t know but whatever you do don’t stop. Just keep on going.

You have to sound sad first, then maybe later you can sound good.

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you’ve got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.

The trio is the biggest sound you can have with the smallest unit.