Dizzy Gillespie

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

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

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.

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

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.

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

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

If I could read it, I could play it.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.

[on Ornette Coleman] Man, that cat is nuts!

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

Jazz is a living music; since its beginning has expressed the feelings, dreams and hopes of the people.

If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.

I’m meant to be an artist who can stand on my own. That’s my place; that’s what I’m supposed to do.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

Music is the shorthand of emotion

I remember Elvis as a young man hanging around the Sun Studios. Even then, I knew this kid had a tremendous talent. He was a dynamic young boy. His phraseology, his way of looking at a song, was as unique as Sinatra’s. I was a tremendous fan, and had Elvis lived, there would have been no end to his inventiveness.

We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.