Duke Ellington

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

There is no art without intention.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.

Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me.

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

The Blues is never old.

No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

In order to be honest with myself, I have to reveal more of who I am. This is a part of the improv process.

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

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time.

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.