Jazz stands for freedom.
Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.
You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.
Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.
Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.
There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.
I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.
Typically I go in the studio and whatever I’m contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don’t come in with lyrics… I just go in and let it happen.
Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.
No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.
How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don’t you ask him? And besides, maybe we’d all like to be like Miles, and just haven’t got the guts.
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!
Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.
In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.
In this trumpet I hear our icons and the sound of the future.
When I achieved what I thought the musicians were trying to do, the sound sort of bloomed. When it’s right, everything is beautiful.
I would’ve loved to have been in a band, but sadly I just wasn’t good enough.
You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.
If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.
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.
Music is an addiction.
