Quotes on Music

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.

It's like if you plant something in the concrete and if it grow and the rose petal got all kinds of scratches and marks, you ain't gonna say, 'Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from the concrete.' You're gonna be like, 'Damn, a rose grew from the concrete?'

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

In this day and time you can't even get sick; you are strung-out! Well by God, I'll tell you something, friend: I have never been strung-out in my life, except on music!

Music is the brandy of the damned.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Music has no effect on research work, but both are born of the same source and complement each other through the satisfaction they bestow

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.