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"When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all."
Standard
Customized
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"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."
People
"I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone."
Love
"It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up."
Sound
"I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio."
Love
"The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano."
Right
"Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention."
People
"I've been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination."
Imagination
"The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music."
Music
"You have to sound sad first of all, then maybe later you can sound good."
First
"When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly."
Music
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"I don't try to make 15 musicians sound like two each."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Because my musical training has been limited, I've never been restricted by what technical musicians might call a song."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We spent a month in LA using a pool of musicians, a string arranger called Benjamin Wright, some great backing singers, and it gave tracks like Dynamite, which was written there, that kind of flavour."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I didn't follow the standard rules of bass playing, and many musicians on many different instruments who became noteworthy for their unique or particular style did a very similar thing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I realized pretty soon that I have to do more than just play bass in the background way. So, I developed a kind of playing which only a handful of musicians accepted."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When I want 30 musicians in the orchestra, I get 30."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don't like."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There's a lot of good musicians who are unheard of. Get it down before they pass away."
Author Name
Personal Development
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