“NINA SIMONE WHEN ASKED IF SHE COULD FIND GOD IN HER MUSIC RESPONDED WITH, ‘OF COURSE, ALL THE TIME’ ! WHEN ASKED TO EXPLAIN SHE STATED, ‘HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO GET ON STAGE AND MAKE POERTY THAT YOU KNOW SINKS INTO THE HEARTS AND SOULS OF PEOPLE WHO ARE UNABLE TO EXPRESS IT ? HOW DO YOU TALK ABOUT THAT ? THERE AREN’T MANY WORDS.”

Excerpt from the book Notes and Tones by Arthur Taylor”

“There was a lot of music going on in my early years in Boston. Like I heard Bud Powell at this time, and even though I felt that it was a spiritually different music, I couldn’t identify with it. Later on I heard Bud’s recording of UN POCO LOCO, and it completely extinguished the Tristano influence which was strong on me in the early Fifties. I also heard later on a concert in Boston in which Mary Lou Willams was playing the piano, and, like, she was playing like Erroll Garner, but her music had a lot of range. I even dug the sonics that Garner can get from the piano, and Mary Lou put that together too. ”

— Cecil Taylor - Excerpt from Four Lives in the Bebop Business by A.B. Spellman

“Rhythm patterns should be more or less like natural breathing patterns. I would like the rhythm section to be as free as I’m trying get, but very few players, rhythm or horns, can do this yet. Thelonious Monk can. He sometime plays one note, and because he plays it in exactly the right pitch, he carries more music in it than if he had filled out the chord. I’d say Monk has the most complete harmonic ear in jazz. Bird has the best diatonic ear. Monk can also play different rhythm patterns, and a drummer I know, Ed Blackwell, is another musician who can play all kinds of time. ”

— Ornette Coleman - Excerpt from Four Lives in the Bebop Business by A.B. Spellman

“Monk is a deep person; I know this because I know Monk well. His interest vary far beyond what most people would imagine. He’s very easy to know as long as you deal with him in a plain and friendly way. But if you try to be dishonest with him or play mental chess with him, then you might have trouble. His mind is something that should be respected at all times. People are too quick to think that a jazz musician knows jazz and that’s it, you know. ”

— Jackie McLean - Excerpt from Four Lives in the Bebop Business - by A.B. Spellman

“It was a new sound. Well, not a new sound, I shouldn’t say that. But it was a new feeling, better than that, and then new usages of chords that Did worked out. Then with Bird in there, they had some things that were going together. You could sing countermelodies. You see, everybody in my band, including the vocalists, was working on that same kick. Sarah Vaughn was my girl vocalist, and we worked on the same type of things. Of course, we got rapped a lot about it, in those days. They said that we were singing . . . some dummies would say we didn’t even know where the melody was. But we were singing improvisations around the melody, which they couldn’t’t hear at that time. That was the reason why my band wasn’t successful , because it was a little too advanced for the people at that time. ”

— Billy Eckstine - Excerpt from To Be or Not To Bop By Dizzy Gillespie

“The way they are treating people in the South, the government can go to hell ! As for the popular president, Dwight Eisenhower, who said he had no brief for ‘the extremists on either side’ of that conflict, Armstrong said; “The President has no guts !” ”

— Louis Armstrong - Excerpt From American Music IS by Nat Hentoff

“1. I wish there was a greater acceptance of jazz.
2. I wish there wouldn’t be any more wars.
3. I wish to have a trio of my own one day. ”

— Ronnie Matthews - Excerpt From Three Wishes - An intimate Look At Jazz Greats - by Pannonica de Koenigswarter

“1. Happiness
2. To really learn how to play
3. A house”

— Charles McPherson- Excerpt From Three Wishes - An Intimate look At Jazz Greats - Ponnonica de Koenigswarter

“The President (Lester Young) never coasted in those days. He was an eager beaver . Kenny Kersey used to play an extremely fast and modern octave style at the keyboard. At the time my head was chock full of “classical vonce” and I, too, was fast and wild as lightning at the piano in my fascination of the competition around me. ”

— Herbie Nichols - Excerpt From Four Lives In the Bebop Business - by A.B. Spellman

“We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.” The demands on and respect for the individual in the jazz band put democracy into aesthetic action. Each performer must bring technical skill, imagination and the ability to create coherent statements through improvised interplay with the rest of the musicians. That interplay takes its direction from the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and timbral elements of the piece being performed, and each player must have a remarkably strong sense of what constitutes the making of music as opposed to the rendering of music which is what performers of European concert music do. The improvising jazz musician must work right in the heat and the pressure of the moment, giving form and order in a mobile environment, where choices must be constantly assessed and reacted to in one way or another. The success of jazz is a victory for democarcy, and a symbol of the aesthetic dignity, which is finally spiritual, that performers can achieve and express as they go about inventing music and meeting the challenge of the moment. ”

— Stanley Couch - Excerpt From His Book - CONSIDERING GENIUS - Opening quote attributed to Thomas Mann From His Book "The Coming Victory of Democracy"

"He was bad, really bad ! AN impeccable sense of music. His whole life, tender, aware of the feelings of others. Wouldn't do anything that might remotely hurt your spirit. Sweet was his phenomenon. That's the only one of that kind. I loved him".

Dizzy Gillespie on Clifford Brown - Excerpt from the book Notes and Tones by Arthur Taylor

“What do you think about the word jazz ?

jazz is a word that came from New Orleans. It came from the French. It was spelled j-a-s-s. A jass house was a house of ill repute. In those days they also called them bawdy houses. This was where the great Louis Armstrong and people of his caliber and those before him had an opportunity to work before a public audience. I imagine the pay was extremely small. Our music was first known as the music that came from those bawdy houses, which were referred to colloquially as jass houses. Therefore, when it moved up the Mississippi to to Chicago, they made it into jazz. Louis Armstrong always referred to his music as New Orleans style . When someone decided to capitalize on it, they called it Dixieland, presumably to take the taint of jazz off. There’s a lot of truth in the saying that when you name something, you claim it. Like you come to this continent and say you name it America, that means you claim it. A person will say: “I’ll call this rhythm and blues instead of rock-‘n’-roll; therefore, I can put my name on it. Even though I am pilfering and imitating, I can still say it’s mine because I have renamed it.” So, they named it jazz. ”

— Max Roach - excerpt from the book Notes and Tones by Arthur Taylor

“When I would come into rehearsals Cecil would say, ‘Sonny, if you want to read , do so , fine’. I would look at it and see it was based on so many sixteenths and so many rests, then I would conceive an idea of how to play this. Then I would alternate it according to what I felt my freedom allowed me to do. Later on, when I could read his charts, I still wouldn’t play them exactly. I felt it would be doing his music an injustice to play it exactly, because he could find anybody to do that.
The first dayI started rehearsing with him, I asked him ‘What should I play’ ? he said ‘Just play’. I said ‘What do you mean’ ? Like a drum solo ? ‘No, I mean just let yourself play your drums, but listen too’. and it happened. ”

— Sonny Murray - on Cecil Taylor - Excerpt from Four Lives in the Bebop Business - by A.B. Spellman

“Jazz also reminds you that you can work things out with other people. It’s hard, but it can be done. When a group of people try to invent something together, there’s bound to be conflict. Jazz urges you to accept the decisions of others. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow - but you can’t give up, no matter what. I is the art of negogiating with style. The aim of every performance is to make something out of whatever happens - to make something together and to be together. ”

— Wynton Marsalis - Excerpt from Moving To Higher Ground - How Jazz Can Change Your Life - by Wynton Marsalis

“I developed my tenor to sound like a alto, to sound like a tenor, to sound like a bass, and I’m not through with it all yet. That’s why they (the critics) get all trapped up. They say, G_ _ _ _ _ _, I never heard Pres play like this ! That’s the way I want them to hear. That’s Modern, you dig ? ”

— Lester Young - Excerpt From American Music IS - by Nat Hentoff

“One night at Minton’s, a club in Harlem where there were all-night sessions, somebody recognized me and said, “There’s a cat from California supposed to play good, let’s get him up here.” Now at that time there were a lot of East Coast musicians who thought it was slick to try to shoot down anyone new on the scene who was starting to make a reputation. It was like an initiation, a ceremonial rite (chump, jump or I’ll burn you up, you don’t know nothin’), calling far-out tunes in strange keys with the hip changes at tempos so fast if you didn’t fly you fell - that’s how you earned your diploma in the University of the Streets of New York.”

— Hampton Hawes -Excerpt From Raise Up Off Me - His Autobiography

“Consider three thoughts: First, are the structures of jazz so enslaving that you have to be free from them? Or do they pose a challenge like the boundaries of a football game, which if discarded make play less liberating ? Second, is it desirous to play for fewer and fewer people ? Should you cultivate a super-elite because you don’t want to maintain any relationship to recognizable forms ? Say I decide to disregard the rules of English. My need to be original is such that I have to use new words to express myself. So if I want to express “Wonderful, wasn’t it ?” I say, “Voom a ratoog” ? That’s okay for me, but what about you ? Third, is it possible for you to rebel against a convention of rebellion ? In stead of abstracted form, instead of doing things that obliterate form, is it possible for to be rebellious by creating form ? I once had a student for whom this was a regular dialog. He’d insist, “Well, you know, I’m trying to stretch things out and go to the boundary.”
’What boundary are you going out to” I’d ask.
’Why, I want to be different. I’m developing things and taking them to the outer limits.”
”Oh ? What outer limits are you taking them to?”
Then he’d go quite for a spell. That meant he was considering that the outer limit was also a boundary, some place that had to be beyond the inner limit. ”

— Wynton Marsalis - Excerpt From To a Young Jazz Musician - LETTERS FROM THE ROAD

“In modern American mythology, we’re inundated with the notion of a rebel without a cause. You’ve read it, seen it, heard it so many times that the philosophy of the disaffected cat just seems natural: trump the world, the hell with it all, let’s tear things up. That’s the American way. But you want to know the truth ? The important part of that story is “without a cause.” There’s scarcely an ounce of rebellion in our minds these days. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were acts of rebellion. People risked there lives to express these ideals. What Louis Armstrong played was an act of rebellion. What Duke Ellington wrote was an act of rebellion, and an expression of freedom. But each of those examples created new systems of order and each works in a particular way governed by certain laws and rules. ”

— Wynton Marsalis - Excerpt From To A Young Jazz Musician - LETTERS FROM THE ROAD