Music is interior decoration.
Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz.
I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!
Your humanity is your instrument.
A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?
Clouds float in the same pattern only once.
The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.
Genius is a word too often tossed around in musical circles.
The Blues? It’s the mother of American music. That’s what is is – the source.
During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.
In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
You know at an early age if you have a talent for music.
Why Jazz? This is just the way I see music.
The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know ? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.
She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.
Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years.
I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.
All this is saying is, OK I see now, the ‘hood does not quite want Shirley Bassey yet, so let me still give them this. Crack Music was made after Diamonds. After black people were like, ‘I don’t know about this one.’ It was like me reaching too high for the cookie jar.
The trio is the biggest sound you can have with the smallest unit.
The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.
I don’t want to sing anything that doesn’t come real.
It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.
