Dexter Gordon

Music is a reservoir… of sounds.

Jazz is a living music; since its beginning has expressed the feelings, dreams and hopes of the people.

Jazz is a beautiful word. I love it.

If you can’t play the Blues you might as well hang it up.

The music scene is more competitive in the States.

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don’t know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

I expect the audience to come up to my level.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.

I don’t think anybody steals anything; all of us borrow.

If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.

If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

Jazz has evolved with an inner necessity characteristic of any true art form.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.

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

I’m on some singer’s record date for a demo and I get a note to call Miles Davis. Of course, I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to take a chance by not calling, and it was Miles. He said, ‘I’ve got a session in an hour over at Columbia, can you make it’

It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.

I think that it is important to try to sound like someone, especially early in your development.

A Jazz man should be saying what he feels: humor, sadness, joy… all the things that humans have.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.