Stan Getz

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.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn’t have a choice.

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

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.

I learn something new every day.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it’s still a melody.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker’s next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?

The guitar chose me.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.

I’m meant to be an artist who can stand on my own. That’s my place; that’s what I’m supposed to do.

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

This be an empty world without the blues.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style…I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t even want to know about chords or anything – they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive…but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz…you must abstract the principles of music which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition. If you don’t understand what it’s about, you’re depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.

[Ben Taylor] He is an interesting combination of the two of us. His voice box is more like mine but the way his tongue sits in his mouth, and the way he pronounces words, is just like James Taylor.