Jazz Musicianship Quotes

That's what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.

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.

To play with a band all of the time, just about nightly, was good for me because I wrote lots of arrangements and I got a lot of my transposition and chords ironed out.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence.

If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

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

I'm not saying that in order to be a great jazz musician you have to be a great classical pianist first. But I am saying that it makes things easier when you can get around the instrument, and you have some idea of how to approach the various hurdles.

It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.

The way to learn the language is to rip off other players. As Benny Golson told me, "We all start off sounding like other cats. And gradually, a lick here or there,we start to sound like ourselves. But it takes a long time to do so..." That'swhat he told me, and it worked for me.

It's a weird thing where, especially in jazz, you have to totally mention cutting sessions and people one-upping each other and people being super, super tough on each other. And out of it emerge these genius musicians.

Jazz musicians have always tended to have cult followings, which is pretty wonderful.