Jazz Quotes

Excerpted from Basic Musicianship

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Henry Mancini - "If you want to make money in music, get into the band uniform business." [P]
Abraham Maslow - "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write to ultimately be at peace with himself."
Henri Matisse - "Jazz is rhythm and meaning." [P]
Henri Matisse - "There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience."
Dave Matthews - "Good music is good music & everything else can go to hell."
John Mayall - "Once you start collecting records you learn more & more about Jazz & Blues."
Cecil McBee - "I have to be on the stage. That's when it comes to me... period." [P]
Christian McBride - "It's not what they think, it's about what's best for the music." [P]
Les McCann - "I feel that when you have something that you believe in all the way, you create an audience." [P]
Susannah McCorkle - "People will always need love, romance, a tender touch & really personal & deeply felt music."
Bobby McFerrin - "Don't worry, be happy!" [P]
Bobby McFerrin - "I have a lot of albums yet to do."
Bobby McFerrin - "The true musician is to bring light into people's hearts." [P]
Bobby McFerrin - "I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument."
Jimmy McGriff - "Look for the one who's not smiling and play to that person. Once you've got that person, you've got the whole club." [P]
John McLaughlin - "Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul." [P]
John McLaughlin - "Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are." [P]

John McLaughlin - "Music cannot be talked about. It can only be played, enjoyed and listened to." [P]
John McLaughlin - "All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician." [P]
John McLaughlin - "It's not what you do, but the way you're doing it and in the end that's all that we have."
John McLaughlin - "You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off."
John McLaughlin - "Indian music is very soulful & the only other school that develops improv to the high degree you find in Jazz."
Jackie Mclean - "How are you going to know what's new to play if you haven't listened to everything that's old?" [P]
John McNiel - "If a player is pushing their ability, a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Maybe even desirable."
Ray McKinley - "Always believe in yourself."
Larry McKenna - "It's important to listen to what's going on around you and feel free to let it be an influence on you." [P]
Ray McKinley - "Play what you want to play, not what you think you should play." [P]
Brian McKnight - "Jazz is about improvisation & the moment in time, doing it this way now & you'll never do it this way twice." [P]
Chris McNulty - "There's a difference between great technique and great chops." [P]
Marian McPartland - "There are a million good tunes." [P]
Marian McPartland - "Mary Lou Williams used to tell me: If you're not feeling right, play a minor tune & it falls into place."
Charles McPherson - "Good food, good vibes. Keep up the good work." [P]
Carmen McRae - "Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it's flat." [P]

Jay McShann - "They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I've heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn't swinging." [P]
John Medeski - "Music is one of the absolute necessities, just like food." [P]
John Mehegan - "Silence also swings." [P]
Brad Mehldau - "Romanticism implies nostalgia for damaged goods."
Brad Mehldau - "The emotional connection is always first and foremost with the song." [P]
Sergio Mendes - "The idea that you could improvise and have under it fantastic harmonies, chords was magical." [P]
Johnny Mercer - "Skylark have you anything to say to me? Won't you tell me where my love can be?
Johnny Mercer - "An early autumn walks the land & chills the breeze & touches with her hand the summer trees."
Johnny Mercer - "We're drinking my friend to the end of a brief episode. Make it one for my baby & one more for the road."
Johnny Mercer - "She's nobody's fool so I'm playing it cool as can be. I'll give it a whirl but I ain't for no girl catching me."
Johnny Mercer - "Icy fingers up & down my spine, the same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine." [P]
Johnny Mercer - "Day in, day out. That same old voodoo follows me about."
Johnny Mercer - "Days of wine & roses laugh & run away, like a child at play."
Johnny Mercer - "You must have been a beautiful baby, 'Cos baby just look at you now." [P]

Helen Merrill - "People with talent are not interested in showing off behind another person." [P]
Annette Messager - "Being an artist means forever healing your wounds and the same time endlessly exposing them." [P]

Pat Metheny - "Listening is the key to everything good in music." [P]
Pat Metheny - "Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways."
Pat Metheny - "Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history." [P]
Pat Metheny - "My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener."
Pat Metheny - "The beauty of Jazz is that it's malleable. People address it to suit their own personalities."
Pat Metheny - "It is Jazz's very nature to change, to develop & adapt to the circumstances of its environment."
Pat Metheny - "I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz."
Pat Metheny - "Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you."
Pat Metheny - "Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that."
Pat Metheny - "People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds."
Agnes de Mille - "The truest expression of a people is in its dance and music." [P]
Glenn Miller - "I haven't a great Jazz band and I don't want one."
Glenn Miller - "I want a kick to my band, but I don't want the rhythm to hog the spotlight."
Glenn Miller - "I thought I had swell ideas and wonderful musicians but no one else did." [P]
Henry Miller - "An artist is always alone if he is an artist. What the artist needs is loneliness." [P]
Henry Miller - "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware." [P]
Marcus Miller - "A great thing about being a musician is you don't stop until the day you die." [P]
Mulgrew Miller - "Jazz is one of the few things you can do in society to express yourself freely and creatively." [P]

Charles Mingus - "Let my children hear music." [P]
Charles Mingus - "I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer."
Charles Mingus - "Jazz music is a language of the emotions." [P]
Charles Mingus - "They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases." [P]
Charles Mingus - "Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." [P]
Charles Mingus - "I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is 'cause I'm changing all the time." [P]
Charles Mingus - "Just because I'm playing Jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz."
Charles Mingus - "Good Jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms & yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars & collapses on his hands & knees. A pure genius of Jazz is manifested when he & the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces & dances around their instruments."
Hank Mobley - "As you get older, you start finding different directions." [P]
Jane Monheit - "Vocalists must study music and know everything an instrumentalist needs to know." [P]

Meredith Monk - "When you start worrying about form, then you're not in the moment." [P]
Thelonious Monk - "I find my inspiration in myself."
Thelonious Monk - "I'm famous... ain't that a bitch?" [P]
Thelonious Monk - "The piano ain't got no wrong notes." [P]
Thelonious Monk - "After two takes you're imitating yourself." [P]
Thelonious Monk - "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."
Thelonious Monk - "I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself."
Thelonious Monk - "I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it." [P]
Thelonious Monk - "I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection & can't develop any further."
Thelonious Monk - "I don't know where Jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens."
Thelonious Monk - "I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you're tired & that's all there is to it."
Thelonious Monk - "Play what you want & let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years." [P]
T.S. Monk - "A Jazz musician is supposed to find his voice, find his niche & do his thing." [P]
T.S. Monk - "Jazz is a work in progress. We'll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years." [P]
J. R. Monterose - "I've tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can't be myself, there's no point being in Jazz." [P]
James Moody - "A wise man practices slowly; but a wiser man practices even slower." [P]
Wes Montgomery - "When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved." [P]
Wes Montgomery - "Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going."
Wes Montgomery - "To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts."
Wes Montgomery - "I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case & throw in a piece of raw meat." [P]

Airto Moreira - "Every time you play you have energy within you, universal energy." [P]
Lee Morgan - "It's either hip or it ain't." [P]
Lee Morgan - "There are no natural barriers. It's all music." [P]
Dan Morgenstern - "Armstrong was the key creator of the mature working language of Jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of a century since his influence first began to spread, not a single musician who has mastered that language fails to make daily use, knowingly or unknowingly, of something that was invented by Louis Armstrong." [P]
Van Morrison - "The point of Jazz is, you do something and then you go on."
Benny Morton - "It was the desire that made it happen." [P]
Jelly Roll Morton - "Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge."
Jelly Roll Morton - "It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902." [P]
Tom Moulton - "Just 'cause I've forgotten more than I can play, doesn't mean it's not Improv."
Gerry Mulligan - "Jazz is a music to be played & not to be intellectualized on."
Gerry Mullligan - "Life on the road is murder. It's as though life begins & ends with your horn in your mouth." [P]
Rob Mullins - "Truth exists in art."
Rob Mullins - "Good art will speak to you if you give it a chance." [P]
Mark Murphy - "I didn't get my music together until I was 40."
Mark Murphy - "Your accompanist has a lot to do with how you sing, so experiment & choose your partner wisely." [P]
Mark Murphy - "My singing evolved with a feeling of intense relaxation, always using my diaphram & breathing specifically through my nose."
Lewis Nash - "I hear beauty and elegance combined with passion and fire." [P]
Fats Navarro - "I'd like to just play a perfect melody of my own, all the chord progressions right, the melody original and fresh... my own."
Oliver Nelson - "I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political." [P]
Sammy Nestico - "Musicianship is using your two ears." [P]
Sammy Nestico - "We may not be changing the world dramatically, but we're improving it one note at a time." [P]
Big Nick Nicholas - "Your ear is the final judge to what sounds right & what sounds wrong." [P]
Jack Nicholson - "The Blues & Jazz will live forever. So will the Delta & the Big Easy." [P]
Judy Niemack - "It's important to find your own voice and do something of your own." [P]
Friedrich Nietzsche - "In music the passions enjoy themselves."
Friedrich Nietzsche - "Those who were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music." [P]
Sal Nistico - "Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig." [P]
Richard M. Nixon - "If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black & the white notes together." [P]
Anita O'Day - "When I'm singing, I'm happy. I'm doing what I can do and this is my contribution to life." [P]
Arturo O'Farrill - "True Jazz lovers understand the rhythms are infectious because they are the roots." [P]
Michelle Obama - "Today Jazz music is performed & listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages & creeds." [P]
Greg Osby - "I'm looking for timelessness in my music." [P]
Alice Sara Ott - "Music can't be perfection. For me, it's imperfection." [P]
Hall Overton - "I am opposed to the practice of trying to make Jazz respectable through the unnatural imposition of classical forms or materials." [P]

More Jazz quotes & quotations:

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