Stan Getz

I learn something new every day.

You don’t rehearse Jazz to death to get the camera angles.

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

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

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.

Jazz musicians are the only workers who will put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.

I want to create music that’s therapeutic.

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

It is great to have your own label; you can cultivate your own artists… I’ve worked with pretty much everyone I wanted to.

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?

When I sing, trouble can sit right on my shoulder and I don’t even notice.

If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

It’s part of what the blues does, to write about these things. JB Lenoir was the main one in this regard – he wrote about Korea, too, in fact. Songs that reflect these current situations – in his case, racial issues for the most part: in my case, what has happened to me, and I was in Korea.

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

Art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.

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.

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.