Gerry Mulligan

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

Eliminating the piano means that I’ve always worked closer with the bass than most players.

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.

When rock music came in, I wasn’t bitter about it. I was puzzled.

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

I’m meant to be an artist who can stand on my own. That’s my place; that’s what I’m supposed to do.

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

One minute we’re over here, the next minute we’re doing something completely different. But it’s interesting because you are producing so many things you couldn’t do with analog.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now. I don’t know which will go first; rock and roll or Christianity.

Critics don’t buy records. They get ’em free.

I kind of hate the fact that people are always trying to put you into a category. I hate walls, and I hate boundaries. I don’t like that. I listen to everything.

I like the interplay in the music.

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

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.