Duke Ellington

Music is what I hear and something that I live by.

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.

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

It’s all music.

A goal is a dream with a finish line.

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

Jazz music is our original American culture.

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.

Jazz is a feeling more than anything else.

I loved the feeling that I got singing.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.

Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.

Jazzmen are our surrogates for the unpredictable, our paladins of constant change.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free

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

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

Let your life be your music and let your music be your life.

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz.