Dexter Gordon

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 hope we left you with something to put under your pillow.

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

What I’m doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word – I love it.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

Jazz to me is a living music. It’s a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

Improvisation is the most widespread of all musical activities. Why did so many people spend so long pretending it never happened?

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

Music allows the great opportunity to play with people you love.

Even now, at 82 years old, if I don’t learn something every day, you know what I think? It’s a day lost. Now, I don’t practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I’m doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That’s why I wanted the clarinet.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

You don’t chose your inspirations, they chose you.

I haven’t got a great jazz band and I don’t want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat’s among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It’s all in what you define as ‘real jazz.’ It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that’s all it is about is opinions.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

I think pop music is one of the few things in the 20th century that have made giant strides in reverse.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.