Charlie Parker

I can play all I know in eight bars.

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

Music is your experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

In Kansas City joints ran 9pm-5am. Pay was a $1.25 a night but somebody special like Count Basie could command $1.50.

I am a devout musician.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

I’ll always write music. Whether I release a record, whether I let the public hear it or not, I’m always writing music.

You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, you’re working without any real feeling.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

Music is the great arbiter of the world, the key to central harmony and a necessary requirement of human emotion.

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

I listen to everything, I listen to all artists that come along.

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

Jazz to me is a living music. It’s a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.