“Learn to Play Yourself on Your Horn…”

“Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.”

Duke Ellington

“Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

Miles Dewey Davis, Jr.

“Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else’s personality, that is not art.”

Bennie Wallace

“If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music.”

Charles Mingus

“I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.”

Thelonious Monk.

“External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.”

Yusef Lateef

“If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.”

Miles Davis

“In Africa I discovered what the true purpose of a musician is. We are historians, and it is our purpose to tell the people the true story of our past, and to extend a better vision of the future.”

Randy Weston

“The idea is more important than the style or the contents of the style you’re trying to play in.”

Ornette Coleman

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

Charles Mingus

“You can do anything you want to do, if you know what to do.”

Betty Carter

Quotes from Jazz Corner.Com.