Gary Burton Quotes

My first love of jazz came from joining the Chilliwack Middle School band - it was like an 18-piece jazz band, and I wanted to join just because the older kids looked like they were having so much fun.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

It's true I've always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

Then I left that school and I went to Cerritos College, which was in southern California; they had one of the best big band programs in the country at the time.

Working as a musician, I have to constantly generate new material, so school keeps me sharp. Reading and writing all the time helps me to be a better songwriter.

I feel like I'm waving the flag for musicianship, trying to bring back bands that can play.

I don't think I've ever been true to jazz. There's always a kind of jazz element to what I do. There are a very few genres that I haven't tried out, really, in what I've been doing. As a jazz musician, you can kind of mess about with things with a certain level of musicianship, which helps.

If somebody's going to represent our music live, I'd like to see it represented with excellence and spectacularly and with really great musicianship.

I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I'm going along.

When I was younger I was much more polemical and didactic, much less trusting. Inherently my own vision of the world would weave its way through the characters. Also, my concerns are changing. What happens is you write a few plays and get boxed into some idea of what your concerns are and what you're supposed to be writing about.

At eleven I was at the peak of my creative powers: I was writing stories and playlets, putting together poetryprojects. I was absorbed by my 'work.' At twelve I was no longer reading or writing, just counting off days and checking them off. I was interested in survival.

To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal. You require absolute control and professionalism.

If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.

As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can't write a play.

After I found out that I was playing music and that I'd have to learn how to read and write music, I started doing that about two years later. Finally, I said, "Oh, that means what I really want to do is to be a composer." But when I was coming up in Texas, there was segregation. There was no schools to go to. I taught myself how to read and how to start writing.

Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Don't play the way it goes. Play the way it is. And the way it is every time you play it, it's slightly different. Look for something. So that's the challenge not to be bored.

When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.

You are not just, "This is the way I play it every night." You are constantly finding new ways in, new attacks, "I want to try it this way. Maybe this scene is affecting that scene. I want to attack this scene differently."

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.

I started to play Jazz music in my early teens. A boyfriend brought records over, so I listened to everything

There are some great teachers who have had great students, but they themselves can't play a note. I don't understand it, because the most I learned from my teacher was just hearing him play.

Education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.