Stan Getz

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

You don’t rehearse Jazz to death to get the camera angles.

My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

There are four qualities essential to a great Jazzman: taste, courage, individuality and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

I feel like….Music is the – it’s the answer. It’s the reason.

I saw a vibraphone for the first time and knew immediately I had found my means of expression.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

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

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

It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom and passion.

I’m not a star. I’m just backing up the cats.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

I discovered very early that it wasn’t quite enough for me to imitate people.

I regard singing pretty much like acting. Each song is like playing a different role. I get very involved with my material. I feel a responsibility for the emotion it brings out in the listener.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one’s own.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.