Jazz Quotes - Page 5

If the audience doesn't hear what is going on, is it going on?

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your magnificent indifference.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that's when I was born.

I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

It isn't true that you live only once. You only die once. You live lots of times if you know how.

Once you discover that you can, then you must.

Composing is improvisation slowed down.

I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.

All music is beautiful.

I think of myself as a complete mystery. To myself.

What are you going to do when you love music? You can't stop.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.

It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.

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.

I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.

Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

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.

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

Jazz, like leadership, combines the unpredictability of the future with the gifts of individuals.

Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.

Jazz is about being in the moment.