Charlie Parker

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

I am a devout musician.

I can play all I know in eight bars.

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

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.

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. Some of it comes from books.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.

If a player is pushing their ability, a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Maybe even desirable.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!

There are notes between notes, you know.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

Musicianship is using your two ears.

I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.

I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

I don’t like recording studios – except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead

Music is the only language in which you cannot say anything sarcastic.