Maynard Ferguson

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.

The louder they [the band] play the softer I sing.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age.

Jazz has always been a man telling the truth about himself.

Once you have been bitten by the Jazz bug, it is not a choice anymore.

The true value of this music lies in an artist’s individual creativity and that unique process of expression which is Jazz.

The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of their instrument.

Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.

If you’re going to make a mistake, make it loud so everybody else sounds wrong.

If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.