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.
Clouds float in the same pattern only once.
A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?
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.
You’re just a little too hip for the room. It’s not good to be too hip because two hips make an ass.
I can play all I know in eight bars.
Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.
Dizzy used to tell me I’m playing too hard. He’d say to not give everything. Miles told me that too.
Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.
I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.
Writing is allowing the musical idea to speak for itself.
An orchestra can become as familiar and reliable an instrument as a well-known, well-worn piano.
The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?
Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.
A guy is influenced by hundreds of people and things, and all show up in his work. To fasten on any one or two is ridiculous. I will say one thing, though. Lennie Tristanos early records impressed me tremendously. Tunes like Tautology, Marshmallow, and Fishin Around. I heard the fellows in his group building their lines with a design and general structure that was different from anything Id ever heard in jazz.
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
If you’re going to make a mistake, make it loud so everybody else sounds wrong.
Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.
I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.
