Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
DUKE ELLINGTONI 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.
More Duke Ellington Quotes
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Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.
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Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.
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New music? Hell, there’s been no new music since Stravinsky.
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I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline!
DUKE ELLINGTON -
Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.
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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.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
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!
DUKE ELLINGTON -
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
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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It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line
DUKE ELLINGTON -
On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.
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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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Simplicity is a most complex form.
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A musical profit outweighs a financial loss.
DUKE ELLINGTON






