If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.
Interpretation
Experience in a smaller scene can be more valuable than competing in a bigger one.
Quincy Jones highlights the importance of local experience and growth, suggesting that working in a smaller, less competitive environment like Seattle provided valuable lessons that are often overshadowed by the grandeur of major cities like New York, where the pressure and competition from influential figures can be overwhelming.
In practice
In a music workshop discussing career paths, one might say, 'As Quincy Jones pointed out, experience in Seattle can be just as valuable as competing in New York.'
Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.
When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.
You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.
I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.
There's no future without the past and anybody who doesn't really understand where jazz has come from has no right to try to direct where it's going.
In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.
I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
They're powerful, those songs. At times they've been my only way back, the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home.
There's something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that 'Everlong' is on it, or 'Best of You' is on it, and it's really special.
I think that music opens portals and doorways into unknown sectors that it takes courage to leap into. I always think that there's a potential that we all have, and we can emerge, rise up to this potential, when necessary. We have to be fearless, courageous, and draw upon wisdom that we think we don't have.
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