George Russell

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

I’m more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I’m very proud of my hands.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

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

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it’s never going to bug you. But here’s the secret about the guitar – it’s defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness.

After you’ve done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.

Jazz is a music that allows a person to express his deepest, most personal self.

It was in tune when I bought it.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

What a fool I am to think my breaking heart could kid the moon.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

What kills me is that everybody thinks I like Jazz.