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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

Duke Ellington

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  Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.

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  It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

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  Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don’t dance, or who never did dance, don’t really understand the beat. I know musicians who don’t and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.

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  The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

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  My mother told me I was blessed, and I have always taken her word for it. Being born of – or reincarnated from – royalty is nothing Like being blessed. Royalty is inherited from another human being; blessedness comes from God.

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• 

  If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.

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• 

  Critics have their purposes, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.

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  I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King’s son.

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  The artist must say it without saying it.

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• 

  I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.

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• 

  Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.

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• 

  I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.

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• 

  Simplicity is a most complex form.

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• 

  There are two kinds of worries – those you can do something about and those you can’t. Don’t spend any time on the latter.

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• 

  Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

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  There is no art when one does something without intention.

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