Dexter Gordon

I hope we left you with something to put under your pillow.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition. If you don’t understand what it’s about, you’re depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.

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.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don’t know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

What I’m doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word – I love it.

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

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.

I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player and a special award in 1961 for quietness.

There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

The fans dictate to you when you’re done!

There’s so many ways you can hit one note.

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

The only thing better than singing is more singing.

Jazz affirms the noblest aspirations of character, individual discipline, perseverance and innovation.

Music opens up minds to dream great dreams about where you can go and what you can do.

As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings. They seem to bring out the feelings of the artist and they brought out my feelings as a kid. They made me wanna move, or sing, or pick up Reverend’s guitar and figure out how to make those wonderful sounds.

I never wanted to be like other blues singers. I might like hearing them play, but I’ve never wanted to be anyone other than myself. There are a few people that I’ve wished I could play like, but when I tried, it didn’t work.