Musicians From The United States

""You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played." and "I love Pops" (Louis' nickname) … Louis has been through all kinds of styles. That's good tuba, by the way. You know you can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played — I mean even modern. I love his approach to the trumpet; he never sounds bad. He plays on the beat — with feeling. That's another phrase for swing. I also love the way he sings."

"The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them...I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them."

"Is that what you wanted, Alfred?"

"I can't tell... All those white tenor players sound alike to me."

"I’ll play it and tell you what it is later."

"When you are creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain't the limit."

"Why'd you put that white bitch on there?"

"I've changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than be white?"

"The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel."

"That's democratic leadership. It's like a flock of geese. They make the calls from the back. ...If you really are leading, everybody is leading. ...Chris Crenshaw ...started to tell me, from the last two songs, who hadn't played. ...So then we all started to look out for each other. ...Then we start to negotiate the song so that we make sure everyone plays."

"I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice."

"I always believed in working hard. ...That’s something that my father and my great-uncle would always tell me. My great-uncle was a stone-cutter for the cemetery, and he was in his nineties. He would always say, "Learn how to work a job. Your job is your identity. You don’t work a job for somebody else. You work your job for yourself." So when I got to be serious about music, I started practicing, and trying to look for teachers."

"I had a trumpet, but I didn't want to be a trumpet player. I wanted to be some type of athlete or in some type of scholarly activity, be a chemist or something―I had my little chemistry set, and I liked playing with it."

"They take your drawers off for you, they show your ass, they sell bullshit, they call themselves 'niggaz' and the women 'bitches' and 'hos' and it's fine with everybody. ...That's what the essence of decadence is. Civilisation is an effort."

"How you feel about Wynton Marsalis may indicate how you feel about jazz. To some fans he’s been a kind of saviour, restoring the music’s essence by reconnecting it to its roots in blues and swing, after its post-1960s fragmentation into fusion, free, world, acid, smooth, etc. But to others, his neo-conservatism is actually anti-jazz, restricting its evolutionary energy and creating ‘mausoleum music’. But no one doubts Marsalis’s authority, sincerity and talent. His virtuosity made him famous when he was barely out of his teens, achieving the unprecedented feat of winning Grammy awards in both classical and jazz categories in the same year. In fact, his passion for the trumpet first led him to jazz. Growing up in New Orleans in the 1970s, Marsalis was a mere dabbler in funk until his classical trumpet teacher introduced him to such jazz masters as Clifford Brown. His imagination was fired by a music that combined individuality and virtuosity, forged in African-American experience. That devotion to the heritage and expressive power of jazz still informs everything Marsalis does. It’s why he has fiercely decried the sort of all-purpose dumbing down which, to him, misrepresents the legacy of such African-American heroes as Armstrong, Ellington and Monk. As the trumpeter berated a critic: ‘We are not some hip sub-culture for your entertainment. Jazz is the most intelligent music of all time.’"

"Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz."

"Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity."

"Some stances are just conducive to swinging. If I stand up straight for too long it's harder to swing. Plus my feet hurt."

"The reason why the music is important is that it's an art form—an ancient art form—that takes in the mythology of our people."

"I'm writing my 5th . It's called the Liberty Symphony. ...It will be rah, rah optimism, but it will also be movements like, "This you did, despite the word of the Lord." ...I take all this very seriously."

"[W]e're in trouble right now, but... a doctor doesn't go into a place where a lot of people are sick and say, "Man, a lot of people are sick here." You're the doctor, man! Come in and help people. So let's roll up our sleeves. A lot of talking always goes on about democracy. Let's see! ...I'm the doctor of democracy. Let's go!"

"That's what I have to say as a band leader. I can't say, "Well, I'm going to solo on every tune. Every time somebody plays it's me." That's not the solution."

"[I]n jazz you can plug the base amp in, the drummer can play loud, one soloist can play 400 choruses, and the next one can fight by playing 430. The music breaks down. You have to balance your freedom to improvise with restraint that comes with swinging and recognizing other people. Democracy dies when you do not understand the need for leveling, and to create wealth for everybody, and to see in your neighbor not an enemy, but a friend, and for elites to manage themselves."

"The level of corruption we're seeing now... I'm a nonpartisan attacker of the corruption I see. I've been doing it for 40 years, and what you're seeing in the public space now is the type of arrogance and criminal activity that we were always working our way towards. Now you see it. ...[H]ow do the people at large respond to this? ...The judicial system is not saving us the way it should. ...[W]e have to wake up and say "we're tired of this..." And... if we don't, we're going to be just like all the other things that could've been something."

"Roaming through the jungle of "oohs" and "ahs," searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats."

"Since jazz is usually celebrated as an improvisor’s art, it may seem paradoxical that one of its major figures was a composer. Though Duke Ellington was a notable pianist, he declared, ‘My band is my instrument,’ and for over half a century he made it the medium of a peerless body of work. For Ellington, composition was never an abstract process, but a direct response to people and situations. He once said, ‘I see something and want to make a tone parallel,’ and the titles of his works are a catalogue of incidents, encounters and atmospheres. ‘Haunted Nights’, ‘The Mooche’, ‘Daybreak Express’, ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ – every Ellington piece enshrines a life in motion, pursued with spontaneity. And Ellington’s lifelong companions were the members of his band – among them the gutbucket growls of trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams, the arching sensuousness of altoist Johnny Hodges and the rumbling majesty of Harry Carney’s baritone. As individual and sometimes contrary a set of virtuosos as ever shared a bandstand, he composed with these sounds and personalities in his head, writing specifically for them. And they provided the raw material for his astonishing originality in harmony and orchestration. To many, Ellington may have been known for such lush popular hits as ‘Sophisticated Lady’, but his colleagues recognised an attainment of another order. As Miles Davis put it, ‘Some day all the jazz musicians should get together in one place and go down on their knees and thank Duke.’"

"That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality."

"Well, that's about the quintessence of slick, professional, expert, boring arrangement. I couldn't say offhand who it was. As I say, I haven't heard jazz for a year. I found it dull—the last word in polish and professionality [sic]—but dull."

"Of course anything that Duke does I like. He just seems to have a sixth sense about things turning out so good ... But I especially like the marriage between strings and what he did with the band. He didn't confine the strings to just whole notes and half notes, which most guys do, but he gave them little pizzicato things and little staccato things in there, which works out beautifully ...."

"Louis Armstrong was on J-and never got off his J-never, never stopped. I mean for all intents and purposes, died with his trumpet in his hand. So did Duke Ellington, all those people who inspire one, who inspire me. Duke was still going on the road right up till the last. Louis Armstrong still on the road till the very last. I appreciate that, I respect it and I am grateful for it. I am grateful, in the name of my grandson I am grateful."

"[Asked about his "fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young" comment] What else could I have said? [...] In the first place, I never do give any thought to prizes. I work and I write, and that's it. My reward is hearing what I have done, and unlike most composers, I can hear it immediately. That's why I keep these expensive gentlemen with me. And secondly, I'm hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without, let us say, official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European music–classical music, if you will–is the only really respectable kind. I remember, for example when Franklin Roosevelt died, practically no American music was played on the air in tribute to him. We were given a dispensation, I must admit. We did one radio program dedicated to him. But by and large, then as now, jazz was the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with. The word 'jazz' has been part of the problem [...] It never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the nineteen-twenties, I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing "negro music". But it's too late for that now. The music has become so integrated you can't tell one part from the other as far as color is concerned. Well, I don't have time time to worry about it. I've got too much music on my mind."

"Fate is being kind to me. [...] Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young."

"How can anyone expect to be understood unless he presents his thoughts with complete honesty? This situation is unfair because it asks too much of the world. In effect, we say, "I don't dare show you what I am because I don't trust you for a minute but please love me anyway because I so need you to. And, of course, if you don't love me anyway, you're a dirty dog, just as I suspected, so I was right in the first place." Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened."

"Every man prays in his own language."

"There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed."

"It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something."

"The piano players were very important in the early days, and the great piano players were always on the East Coast; there never was anybody in the West who could play two notes. (By West I mean ; in those days there was no other West to speak of, west of that.) , who was mainly a writer and had more music published than anyone else, played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington; as a matter of fact, high school teachers played better jazz. Among other things, his rhythm was unsteady; but that's the kind of piano the West was geared up to. On the other hand, the piano players on the East Coast did the most impossible things. If you dig up the early piano rolls or records by , you will hear the most beautiful and perfect performances. was a giant of those days, too. It is one of my great regrets that when the Lion used to come up to my house I didn't have a recording machine so that I could preserve some of those early performances of his."

"[Asked about the vogue for Rock 'n' Roll and calypso] [N]o matter what you call it, music is as good as it sounds. Music is an oral art. Until you hear it, it is not music and if it sounds good it is good."

"Playing "Bop" is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing."

"My band is my instrument more than the piano."

"I know what sounds well on a trombone and I know what sounds well on a trumpet and they are not the same. [...] I know what Tricky Sam can play on a trombone and I know what Lawrence Brown can play on a trombone and they are not the same either."

"[Y]ou've got to write with certain men in mind. You write just for their abilities and natural tendencies and give them places where they do their best—certain entrances and background stuff. You got to know each man to know what he'll react well to. One guy likes very simple ornamentation; another guy likes ornamentation better than the theme because it gives him a feeling of being a second mind. Every musician has his favorite licks and you gotta write to them."

"You can't write music right [...] until you know how the man that'll play it plays poker."

"[Expressing a liking for trains] Folks can't rush you until you get off."

"As Bach says [...] if you ain't got a left hand, you ain't worth a hoot in hell."

"[Sights enabling musical inspiration] The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician [...] Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique."

"I think of music sometimes in terms of color [...] and [in a furnace] I like to see the flames licking yellow in the dark and then pulsing down to a kind of red glow."

"It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)."

"I've also gotten weird letters, suicide letters, girls threatening to jump if I don't get in touch with them. So you think, "This is bullshit," but then you think, "What if it's not? Who wants to take that chance?" I write them back, tell them to hang in there, if things are that bad, they have to get better. But I'm not altogether stable myself, so who am I to give advice?"

"We watched everything...A family favorite was Cry-Baby starring Johnny Depp. Whenever the John Waters film broke out in song, we would all scream and start singing, too."