Charlie Parker

Music is your experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

You’ve got to learn your instrument.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.

I am a devout musician.

Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.

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

Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

The Blues is never old.

I’m a big fan of music, a student. I just wanna learn and keep enhancing my education about Jazz.

Hipness is not a state of mind, it’s a fact of life.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?

It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

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

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

The guitar chose me.

There are a million good tunes.