Stan Getz

I came from an era when we didn’t use electronic instruments. The bass wasn’t even amplified. The sound was the sound you got.

My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

We made records to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records. I still feel that way. I put out a record because I think it’s beautiful, not necessarily commercial.

There are four qualities essential to a great Jazzman: taste, courage, individuality and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public’s going to like, anyway.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.

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

When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind.

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

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.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That’s why I wanted the clarinet.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

The reward for playing Jazz is playing Jazz.

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.