Great Throughts Treasury

"On one level, life is the process of seeking out and enjoying experiences - from the transcendent to the tragic. Life has as cyclical pattern of movement and appreciation; even when you’re not doing anything, you’re probably in a situation you sought. On another level, life is the experience of the self’s interaction with the world. The self can be broken down into three main elements and their corresponding activities: first, the heart (knowing compassion, receiving and giving love); second, the intellect (acquiring and digesting information); third, the senses (acting and being acted upon). It is the soul, however, that focuses and inspires all three the soul gives us resilience -an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship... The meaning of life can’t be understood without first looking at the self and its interaction with the world. In effect, this amounts to examining the inner workings of the soul of the universe."

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

"And the thing about jazz, through all the business involved in practicing and improvement, it's always sweet: the improvement that you notice in the ability to express yourself, the feeling of playing, pushing yourself out into an open space through a sound, man. That's an unbelievable feeling, an uplifting feeling of joy to be able to express the range of what you feel and see, have felt and have seen. A lot of this has nothing to do with you. It comes from another time, another space. To be able to channel those things and then project them though an instrument, that's something that brings unbelievable joy."

"And then the West Africans were allowed to play their music in Congo Square. That happened nowhere else in the United States. That was the true key ingredient. The music and all the traditions and the sense of self-worth that comes with being able to have your own art form and customs and traditions, that was a part of the Afro American that lived in New Orleans."

"A sense of loss, a great and deep loss."

"A beat is a moment in the life a groove."

"And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it."

"A musician's whole life is to listen."

"Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does."

"But you listen to Coltrane and that?s something human, something that?s about elevation. It?s like making love to a woman. It?s about something of value, it?s not just loud. It doesn?t have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn?t. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play."

"Congo Square is the only place where African slaves were allowed to play their music, and is one of the most-important points"

"Don?t bullshit? just play."

"As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also."

"As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all."

"Because jazz musicians improvise under the pressure of time, what?s inside comes out pure. It?s like being pressed to answer a question before you have a chance to get your lie straight. The first thought is usually the truth."

"Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition."

"Don't worry about what others say about your music. Pursue whatever you are hearing... but if everybody really hates your music maybe you could try some different approaches."

"Duke Ellington always had a style: original, clean with interesting color combinations. He had an artist's eye."

"Don't wish for someone else to do later what you can do now."

"Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance."

"Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements."

"Even in these times, there are still neighbors that will turn their backs on neighbors."

"Generally, when I wake up in the morning I set out a series of problems for myself and I write them down, and when I'm sleeping, my mind solves the problems. When I wake up in the morning, I have more clarity on the issue."

"Grace Kelly plays with intelligence, wit and feeling. She has a great amount of natural ability and the ability to adapt. That is the hallmark of a first-class jazz musician."

"Ethics are more important than laws."

"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."

"I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time."

"I am grateful to Mayor Bloomberg for giving me the opportunity to show that in this season of renewal, the people of the gulf region will rebuild and rejoice once again."

"How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense."

"He was an exponent of the music and a defender of it for 50 years on the road, all over the world. He created a body of music that's unequalled, really, with the exception of Bach, in the history of music."

"I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum."

"I almost never watch TV, except for '60 Minutes' and pro football. I love Drew Brees, the Manning brothers and the Steelers' linebackers."

"I became a man in New York. New York made me the musician that I am and the person that I am, so it's impossible for me to say I regret having lived there."

"I didn't get into classical music till I was in high school. I met a guy on a streetcar who gave me a recording of Maurice Andr‚ playing classical trumpet concerti. Until then I'd only been interested in Clifford Brown and Miles, but I started liked that, so I got some more of his albums, and when I was 14, I won a competition to play the Haydn trumpet concerto at high school. Yeah, I got better quickly."

"I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play."

"I believed in studying just because I knew education was a privilege. It was the discipline of study, to get into the habit of doing something that you don't want to do."

"I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking."

"I didn't want to get that ring around my lips from practicing the trumpet, because I thought the girls wouldn't like me. So I never practiced."

"I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are."

"I dress up a certain way because I respect the music."

"I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?"

"I generally work right up to when I have to do something - I'm always doing a lot."

"I got my first trumpet when I was six years old, from Al Hirt. My father was playing in Al Hirt's band at that time."

"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 like playing with it."

"I grew up in the South, and our way of dealing with each other was teasing, ribbing, making fun and scrapping in the street. Criticism doesn't bother me so much. It actually made me, when I was younger, more aggressive. But you get into middle age, and you lose interest in that stuff. It's not serious."

"I had to figure out how to survive in New York, and most of my time was occupied in getting an apartment and getting money. A lot of older jazz guys looked out for me and found me gigs and places to stay."

"I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy."

"I hate auto-pilot playing... And I think you know the kind of playing I'm talking about."

"I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review."

"I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable."