Don Ellis

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

I expect the audience to come up to my level.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel.

I think music needs to be of its time and speak to that time.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

Know the business; you need to know the business side of things.

You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.

Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.

Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don’t have to worry about anything.

The radio makes hideous sounds.

Good Jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms and yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of Jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.

Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I’d just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn’t gotten kicked out of school I wouldn’t be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.

There are a million good tunes.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

I think that it is important to try to sound like someone, especially early in your development.

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.