Charlie Parker

I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.

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

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

Master your instrument, master the music and then forget all that and just play.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.

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

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!

Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal.

Jazz is a complete lifestyle, something that you feel, something that you live.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

Good music is good music and everything else can go to hell.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

I think you can play anything you wanna as long as you take the audience along with you.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity.

Music is what feelings sound like.

Love is sweeping the country.

If I don’t learn something new every day, it’s a day lost

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.