Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.
DUKE ELLINGTONThere is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!
More Duke Ellington Quotes
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New music? Hell, there’s been no new music since Stravinsky.
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Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.
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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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Simplicity is a most complex form.
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I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
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I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.
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You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.
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Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.
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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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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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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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Gray skies are just clouds passing over.
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If you have a great band with a mediocre drummer, you have a mediocre band. If you have a mediocre band with a great drummer, you have a great band!
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Yet, every time God’s children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.
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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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Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited.
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The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me, so extraordinary a musician is he.
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Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
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The artist must say it without saying it.
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The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
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I don’t need time, I need a deadline.
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I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
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Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.
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Somehow I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself.
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Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.
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Of the One O’Clock Lab Band after hearing their performance, and sitting in with them at the White House: “I wish it were mine”.
DUKE ELLINGTON