Duke Ellington

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

Musicians need enough experience to develop a vocabulary.

Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano.

Talk of God is most often in church. Is there a God outside of church? I hope so. But how should I know? How does anybody know?

I can’t understand these guys who just have to have your autograph. I asked one of them ‘What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?’

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.

Of course there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it’s going to be difficult to get them across unless you have 1-a distinctive sound or 2- a loud sound. These are musts.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

There’s two things you can’t live without. Water and music.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.