JAZZ!!! Jazz Quotes for Your Inspiration!

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Jazz Quotes from all the Jazz greats: Miles Davis quotes, Joe Pass quotes, Charlie Parker quotes, Duke Ellington quotes, Bill Evans quotes, John Coltrane quotes, Dizzy Gillespie quotes, Mike Stern quotes, John Scofield quotes, Oscar Hammerstein quotes, and more to come!

This is the first quotes collection in the all new Music Quotes section at Guitar-Theory-in-Depth.com. Watch out for all of what's coming by subscribing to our RSS feed!!!

John Coltrane Quotes

"You can play a shoestring if you're sincere"
-John Coltrane

"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."
-John Coltrane

"I think playing and writing go hand in hand. I don't feel that at this stage of the game I can actually sit down and say I'm going to write a piece that will do this or that for the people -a thing which some artists can do- but I'm trying to tune myself so I can look to myself and to nature and to other sounds in music and interpret things that I feel there and present them to people. Eventually I hope to reach a stage where I have a vast warehouse of study and knowledge to be able to produce any certain thing.
Duke Ellington is one person who can do this -that's really heavy musicianship and I haven't reached that stage yet. I've been predominantly a soloist all my natural life, and now I'm a soloist with my own band, and this has led me into this other thing: what am I going to play and why?
My material is mainly my own, and I find some of my best work comes from the most challenging material. Sometimes we write things to be easy, sometimes to be hard, it depends on what we want to do. A year ago we had quite a few standards which made up a third of the book, but now other people, certainly Ornette (Coleman) and Eric (Dolphy), have been responsible for other influences."
-John Coltrane
1962 interview, Jazz Monthly

"It's more than beauty that I feel in music -that I think that musicians feel in music. What we know we feel we'd like to convey to the listener. We hope that this can be shared by all. I think, basically, that's about what it is we're trying to do. If you ask me that question, I might say this today and tomorrow something entirely different, because there are many things to do in music.
But over-all, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe. That's what music is to me -it's just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's been given to us, and here's an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That's what I would like to do, I think that's one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we try to do it in some way. The musician's way is through his music."
-John Coltrane
(When asked what he and Eric Dolphy were trying to achieve)

Dizzie Gillespie Quotes

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds."
-Dizzy Gillespie

"Diz for Pres"
-From a bumper sticker: Dizzy Gillespie postulated himself for president in the 1964 U.S. elections. He said that if he got elected, the White House would be renamed "The Blues House"!
His proposed cabinet: Duke Ellington: Secretary of State; Miles Davis: Director of the CIA; Max Roach: Secretary of Defense; Charles Mingus: Secretary of Peace; Ray Charles: Librarian of Congress; Louis Armstrong: Secretary of Agriculture; Mary Lou Williams: Ambassador to the Vatican; Thelonious Monk: Travelling Ambassador; and Malcolm X: Attorney General). He said his running mate would be Phyllis Diller.

Mike Stern Quotes

"The more you know, the less you know. I don't feel like I know shit anymore, but I love it!"
-Mike Stern

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John Scofiled Quotes

"Sound is what drives my solos, not verbal concepts: I never think 'I'm going to use a Lydian Dominant scale and then go up a half-step', even though that might be exactly what I end up doing..."
-John Scofield

Oscar Hammerstein Quotes

"All the sounds of the earth are like music."
-Oscar Hammerstein

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