musician quotes

Handel is so great and so simple that no one but a professional musician is unable to understand him.

- Samuel Butler
Collected in H F  Jones (ed)  The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (1912).

The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe.

-John Coltrane
  Quoted in sleeve-note to the re-issue of Coltrane's Sound (originally published1961).

You could be a great musician, an innovative and important artist, but nobodycared if youdidn't makethe white people who were in control some money.

- Miles Dewey, III Davis
  Autobiography, ch.10.

It is this tendency to play with manic enthusiasm on every possible occasion that distinguishes the amateur jazz musician from the professional, often to the public detriment of the latter, who are regarded as snootyand unfriendly.

- Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton
  Why No Beethoven?, ch.1.

   I have always wanted to develop a way of writing that was irrevocably black. I don't have the resources of a musician but I thought that if it was truly black literature, it would not be black because Iwas, it would notevenbe black because of its subject matter. It would be something intrinsic, indigenous, something in the way it was put togetherthe sentences, the structure, texture and toneso that anyone who read it would realize.

-Toni Chloe Anthony ne  e Wofford Morrison
Quoted in Paul Gilroy Small  Acts (1993),'Living memory: a meeting with Toni Morrison'.

A rather bitter Britishmusicianonceremarked sourly toa friend of mine: 'Oh, all she knows about music she learned in bed with musicians.' To that, I can only add, what better place to learn?

-Val(erie) Wilmer
  Mama SaidThere'd Be Days LikeThis, ch.3.