Duke Ellington

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

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

A goal is a dream with a finish line.

Life has two rules: 1. Never quite 2. Always remember 1.

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It’s over; it’s on the record.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!

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

Let your life be your music and let your music be your life.

Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

When Hank Jones had his night off, I would get somebody to take my place as intermission pianist and I’d play the show with Ella, so I would get a chance to play with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as well.

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.