Stan Getz

I learn something new every day.

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.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it’s like the human voice

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

I never have any trouble playing anything I can think of. The trouble is thinking of what to play.

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.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

There’s so many ways you can hit one note.

In a way, I started out to be a baritone player.

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

Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.

To imitate someone is to insult them.

There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!

I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen. You can’t sit back and try to figure out what people want or leave it up to them to decide. When we all started in this business we would dictate to the audience what was great and they picked up on that based on the fact that we believed that it was great. But that’s all changed. What’s happened in the last ten years or so because is that the technology now means that everyone with a computer can make music and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.

It’s a matter of who would be right for each song. Mickey Hart for ‘All We Need is An Island’ – he’s the only guy I know who has Tahitian drums and every kind of drum on the planet.