Don Ellis

I worked until I could play and do changes at any tempo in any key and said ‘What else is there?’ Now I’m finding out.

I expect the audience to come up to my level.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that’s when I was born.

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

I’ve had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I’ve had lots of guys call me up. I’ve gotten two or three commissions to write things. I’ve written lots of movie scores.

To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical and spiritual need for me.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I ‘d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good – he’s rock’s #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us.

I have been doing music all my life so everyday when I get up I expect music will be part of it.

Jazz is a complete lifestyle, something that you feel, something that you live.

Music is the great arbiter of the world, the key to central harmony and a necessary requirement of human emotion.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

I am inclined to just write music and not worry about what people can or can’t do.