The time is now.
You’ve got to learn your instrument.
Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.
In Kansas City joints ran 9pm-5am. Pay was a $1.25 a night but somebody special like Count Basie could command $1.50.
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.
Master your instrument, master the music and then forget all that and just play.
If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved.
I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?
In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.
You want the audience to feel what you’re doing.
As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.
There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.
The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn’t be able to do that.
Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.
Never lose the groove to find a note.
I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.
The idea is more important than the style you’re playing in.
My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.
Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.
