Freddie Hubbard

When I got started in New York, if you were different from Miles and Dizzy it was very difficult.

Dizzy used to tell me I’m playing too hard. He’d say to not give everything. Miles told me that too.

I am at my core a singer/songwriter a la James Taylor or a la Billy Joel. It’s not that I don’t want to work with people, but I do just love doing my own thing.

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

The sound of the orchestra is one of the most magnificent musical sounds that has ever existed.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

I don’t really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I’d like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.

Just allow your feelings to go with the music and you’ll find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

The Blues and Jazz will live forever. So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.

From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.

If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.

If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel.

I try to teach by example and not force ideas on a young musician. We’re here to be part of a process of exchange.