Simplicity is a most complex form.
DUKE ELLINGTONPlaying ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
More Duke Ellington Quotes
-
-
Music is the tonal reflection of beauty.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
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.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
Yet, every time God’s children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!
DUKE ELLINGTON -
Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
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 ELLINGTON -
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.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
People do not retire. They are retired by others.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
A musical profit outweighs a financial loss.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
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.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
Gray skies are just clouds passing over.
DUKE ELLINGTON -
New music? Hell, there’s been no new music since Stravinsky.
DUKE ELLINGTON