Clark Terry

Imitate, assimilate and innovate.

What are you going to do when you love music? You can’t stop.

Genius is a word too often tossed around in musical circles.

Gershwin was right in his time, at his time. Everybody else was behind.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

Jazz improvisation is the art of drawing without an eraser.

Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.

He’s not a performer, he’s not a composer, he’s not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.

Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it’s going to be difficult to get them across unless you have 1-a distinctive sound or 2- a loud sound. These are musts.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.

Mary Lou Williams used to tell me: If you’re not feeling right, play a minor tune and it falls into place.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

We all played bad before we played good.