Quotes on Jazz

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It's over; it's on the record.

If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There's fun in being serious.

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.

All of the technique doesn't matter... only if the feeling is right.

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

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

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

If you're gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

I don't need words. It's all in the phrasing.

Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.

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

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

Music is love in search of a word.

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

I want to play music that draws a picture of the world and its space.

There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.

Roaming through the jungle of "Ohs" and "Ahs", searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.

I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.