Don Ellis

I expect the audience to come up to my level.

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.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands …If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

It’s important to find your own voice and do something of your own.

Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.

People will hire you and then tell you not to do what you were doing when they heard you.

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

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

People will always need love, romance, a tender touch and really personal and deeply felt music.

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.