Marian McPartland

Mary Lou Williams used to tell me: If you’re not feeling right, play a minor tune and it falls into place.

When I got started in New York, if you were different from Miles and Dizzy it was very difficult.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.

I regard singing pretty much like acting. Each song is like playing a different role. I get very involved with my material. I feel a responsibility for the emotion it brings out in the listener.

This be an empty world without the blues.

The guitar chose me.

It was in tune when I bought it.

Jazz has evolved with an inner necessity characteristic of any true art form.

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

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

To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.

Jimmy (Wakely) told me, ‘I don’t want you to sound so much like Dinah Washington.’ So, I thought, ‘How can I get around this?’ And one of the people I really dug was Patti Page. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to sound like her.’ I actually did with a couple curly-cues thrown in for effect, but, that’s how I started getting away from the predominant Dinah influence, and getting my own style together.

Jazz means many things to many people, but it’s all about choices.

A lot of singers think all they have to do is exercise their tonsils to get ahead. They refuse to look for new ideas and new outlets, so they fall by the wayside… I’m going to try to find out the new ideas before the others do.