Gerry Mulligan

I’m fascinated with the electronic devices that we can mess around with.

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

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

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

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

I’ve always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.

Just allow your feelings to go with the music and you’ll find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, ‘That’s just that ole blues singer.’

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

I learn something new every day.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

I think that it is important to try to sound like someone, especially early in your development.

I’m on some singer’s record date for a demo and I get a note to call Miles Davis. Of course, I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to take a chance by not calling, and it was Miles. He said, ‘I’ve got a session in an hour over at Columbia, can you make it’

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

I wrote “Pilot of My Destiny” because of my love of flying. The fact that my brother is a pilot inspired me to write it. I call him pilot. He calls me copilot.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all

I always make it a point to pick songs on which players really shine.