Lee Konitz Quotes

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

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.

One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.

Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

This is what really makes real jazz musicians: people coming out with their own voice.

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.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.

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 musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

It's funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don't learn jazz in school.

Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.

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

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

You have to go out and learn jazz by playing.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

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

People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.