Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I believe that regardless of how many people you've listened to or emulated over the years, your sound is you and what you really feel inside.
I didn't want to get that ring around my lips from practicing the trumpet, because I thought the girls wouldn't like me. So I never practiced.
I expect the audience to come up to my level. I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.
The apartheid people were actors, and they had to act out their part in their beliefs every day. That's why we always saw them as being comedic.
Give me a kiss to build a dream on And my imagination will thrive upon that kiss Sweetheart, I ask no more than this A kiss to build a dream on.
Mandela was chosen as a symbol of the South African struggle, and he did that great. But I wasn't just happy for him. I was happy for the people.
These record companies are going to be going out of business pretty soon, because people are just going to be downloading what they want to hear.
You either have it or you don't. You play your horn just like you sing a song or a hymn. If it's in your heart, you express yourself in the tune.
When you are trying to do something when you are getting started and you are trying to make records for the first time, you want it to be the best.
Well, I tell you... the first chorus, I plays the melody. The second chorus, I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus, I routines.
Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine, I look right into the heart of good old New Orleans. It has given me something to live for.
Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.
What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world?
I had a chance to play with the best musicians that were coming through because I was pretty good myself or else they wouldn't have tolerated with me.
I'm definitely a romantic, I don't think life is really worth all the pain and effort and struggling if you don't have somebody that you love very much
When I left South Africa in 1960 I was 20 years old. I wanted to try to get an education, and music education was not available for me in South Africa.
Even If I have two three days off, you still have to blow that horn. You have to keep up those chops... I have to warm up everyday for at least an hour.
And my identity...I never really wondered about it because, unfortunately, I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.
The young very seldom lead anything in our country today. It's been quite some time since a younger generation pushed an older one to a higher standard.
When me and my brother would go to see our daddy playing, there'd be 30 people in the audience. I was only 14 or 15, but I realised something was wrong.
My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.
Musicians like to converse. There's always interesting conversation with musicians - with classical musicians, with jazz musicians, musicians in general.
We have the freedom to either play a tempo or not to play a tempo; to play a note or not to play a note; or to play what some people would say is a sound.
There is no such thing as 'on the way out' as long as you are still doing something interesting and good; you're in the business because you're breathing.
It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do.
There's a fine line between heartbreak and love. It's a compliment when someone tells me my music put them in a place when where they were almost in tears.
The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art
I became a man in New York. New York made me the musician that I am and the person that I am, so it's impossible for me to say I regret having lived there.
Many a revolution started with the actions of a few. Only 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence. A few hanging together can lead a nation to change.
It's important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let's revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.
They were missing all the enthusiasm, the creativity; that whole excitement about the music was lost. A lot of people are really going back looking for that.
If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it.
In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it's a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don't listen.
Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem.
I know that I haven't invented anything myself, that I am only a mixture of countless influences, and thanks to that I am able to find my own style of playing.
The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.
The symphonic orchestras have sponsors, people who give them endowments, and I think it should be the same way with jazz - because this is a national treasure.
I'd listened to [Ornette Coleman] all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving baby.
There really have only ever been a few people in each generation who step out, are willing to put themselves on the line, and risk everything for their beliefs.
If you are serious about American culture and you are serious about Afro-American culture, you are in a lot of pain. You are not - you are not smiling about it.
We learn a language through its song, and even if you don't have music you have the song of people you love's voice, and you'll notice that song in their voice.
Not only in Africa but in much of the world, most leaders' pockets are lined by industrial business. And industrial business is never going to stop aiming at profit.
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
Jazz celebrates older generations and not just the youth movement. When you 'sell' only to people of a certain age, you get cut off from the main body of experience.
I had heard Ornette a couple of times, but I didn't really know where he was coming from until we started the record and it was beautiful, Fred. It opened up my mind.
Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.
As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also.
I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.
It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics dope and all of that stuff. It is a thousand times better than whiskey. It is an assistant and a friend.