Charlie Parker

I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.

The time is now.

They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

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

I can play all I know in eight bars.

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.

What we play is life.

Everything I’ve ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

‘Swing’ is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a ‘swing band’ in music.

Practice 15 or 20 years and then it comes out spontaneously.

After two takes you’re imitating yourself.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

You can separate the men from the boys and ballads.

I’ve always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.

I was probably six years old when I first sang before an audience.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

When you hear my lyrics, you hear the shots that I throw at people. I throw shots because I always been the underdog. I got rejected so many times, and I say it in my lyrics constantly.

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.