Freddie Hubbard

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

They always want to sell me as a hard bopper.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it’s still a melody.

Apparently Jazz is now considered high art and the average person has trouble understanding it.

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.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

Jazz means many things to many people, but it’s all about choices.

I remember going to sleep many nights with a Gibson catalog, dreaming about getting a Les Paul. I finally did, with a loan from my Dad. It’s a really heavy instrument. But it plays like butter. I met Les backstage at a show once. Jeff Beck made me play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ for Les, which was a little embarrassing. He changed history, big-time.

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing and instrumental personality.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

We made records to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records. I still feel that way. I put out a record because I think it’s beautiful, not necessarily commercial.

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.