Quotes on Jazz Music

You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, 'Yes, where are you going?' And he says, 'I want a ticket to nowhere.' I thought: that's it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.

A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.

...people will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand...That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.

When I die, I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it.

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.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.