“Music helps not the toothache.”

“A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do.”

“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the form the music is always graver than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.”

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides!”

“A musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in the technique of the art entirely falls away, and in some moment of inspiration, he becomes the instrument through which music is played.”

“Music is too idealistic a thing to permit itself to be bound to concrete references. You cannot have a white horse in music.”

“There’s only one way to sum up music: either it’s good or it’s bad. If it’s good you don’t mess about with it; you just enjoy it.”

“Forget the notes so that you can play them.”

When asked to define jazz, Louis “Satchmo Armstrong replied, “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”

“Canned music is like audible wallpaper.”

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

“Disharmony is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.”

“Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better.”

“Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.”

“Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.”

“What we play is life.”

“Music is your own experience, your thought, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”

“Jazz is about the only form of MUSIC in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.”