Duke Ellington

Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.

Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

When the music changes, so does the dance.

A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

I expect the audience to come up to my level.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

There’s two things you can’t live without. Water and music.

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.

What’s tied Jazz together is its foundation in the Blues, a reliance on group interplay and the unique phenomenon of spontaneous improvisation.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?