Albert Murray Quotes

Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden!

My thing was, I loved music. I played music: I played the saxophone. So the little bit of music knowhow I had, I tried to implement that in every thing I did, from my style, my cadence, the way I tried to pause and stagnate it; that all came from John Coltrane and listening to jazz albums. Trying to rhyme like a jazz player.

If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

I already experimented with free jazz in the 1960s and, in my opinion, to play free jazz, you have to be a perfect musician and a perfect human being - and none of us are!

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

Whatever it is, music should sound spontaneous, I've derived a great deal of pleasure from playing jazz and having the knowledge of that spontaneity.

I suppose technically I could say I'm based in jazz, just because it's the school of thought that I've been encouraging myself to operate within.

I've always been a jazz fan, but I don't write much about jazz, because I don't have the chops. But it's really, really hard to write about improvised instrumental music when you don't have a good knowledge of harmony and can't identify rhythm signatures very easily either.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.

One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

You have to go out and learn jazz by playing.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

The way jazz works is that we take a theme, and then we write using the same structure, same chord changes, and then we can do different tunes.

Many people don't understand how disciplined you have to be to play jazz... And that is really the idea of democracy - freedom within the Constitution or discipline. You don't just get out there and do anything you want.

I think that the jazzy approach that I have is based on the way that I hear music and in the way I play a supporting role to the other people in the band.

In essence, I feel I'm more jazz guitar player because I write vehicles geared for improvisation.

I love jazz and blues, where there's a structure, but a lot of the cool stuff is veering off the page and playing.

Even though the music I make gathers influences from all over the place, I feel that the core of what I do comes from the jazz tradition. In terms of improvisation, interaction, feel and overall concept, Jazz is my main source of information and inspiration.

Jazz is a hard music, and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that's the most important thing.

Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept. He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were.