Mark Murphy

Your accompanist has a lot to do with how you sing, so experiment and choose your partner wisely.

I didn’t get my music together until I was 40.

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Never lose the groove to find a note.

We might as well swing boys, because Stravinsky cuts us all.

I love it. When they stop imitating me then I’ll start wondering where I’m going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!

Our music is generally the music I would play way back when I was in the record business. So I’ll play World Waiting For The Sunrise and How High The Moon, maybe Over The Rainbow, some standards. But it depends upon the artist that comes up – if people like a certain kind of music, I will focus the show that way. Whoever walks up on to the stage is the star – he is the picture, we are the frame. The frame is there to make the star look better – let’s make this fellow the best he’s ever going to be.

If a Jazz musician plays someone else’s song, he has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

When you want ’em you can’t get ’em, when you’ve got ’em, you don’t want ’em.

Jazz and love are the hardest things to describe from rationale.

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