Let my children have music.
I’m too busy playing. When I’m playing I don’t pay attention to who’s listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don’t listen to one instrument; you listen to music.
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.
I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.
Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.
In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
The radio makes hideous sounds.
As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.
We’re here to have a ball.
Jazz music has always been a place where anything is possible.
There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.
My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
I learned my songs from the birds of the Brazilian forest.
There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.
All that I’ve played, all that I’ve sung, I couldn’t have done any other way.
I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.
We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.
How are you going to know what’s new to play if you haven’t listened to everything that’s old?
Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.
Trios offer simple instrumentation, but the orchestral possibilities are so profound.
Everyone is working who should be.