Dizzy Gillespie Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Dizzy Gillespie's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Bandleader Dizzy Gillespie's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 33 quotes on this page collected since October 21, 1917! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Dizzy Gillespie: Jazz Music more...
  • Where there's no mutual respect, there's trouble!

  • Learn to play the piano, man, and then you can figure out crazy solos of your own.

    Men   Play  
  • There are a lot of great players... a lot of great players around, but Louie Bellson is really something special.

  • I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be in that particular spot...You have many things to pick from when you're playing, so you try to train yourself to pick out the best things that you know.

    Play  
  • We loved one another, man. I mean all those stories about the rift ... there was no question of a rift between Charlie Parker and me.

    Men  
  • The idea of life is to give and receive.

  • Everyone wants to put people on, I think. And get away with it! That's the thing: put people on and get away with it! That's a science in itself.

  • Many critics always saw and heard that my style comes from Roy Eldridge, which is true. But for many things, not only how to play the trumpet but the way to choose the notes, how to play them and how to phrase all of them, I took that from Sweets [Edison]. He really brought something new to the trumpet.

    Play  
  • Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that.

    Music   Men   Serious  
  • When I grow up I want to be just like Benny Carter!

  • How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don't you ask him? And besides, maybe we'd all like to be like Miles, and just haven't got the guts.

    Jazz  
  • Bop is at the end of the road. Now everybody wants dance music.

    Jazz  
  • Mutual respect is so important because as soon as it disappears in relations between you and the next person, there's trouble.

    Dizzy Gillespie (2009). “To Be, Or Not-- to Bop”, p.127, U of Minnesota Press
  • They're not particular whether you're playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

    Music   Dance   Long  
  • Jazz will be the classical music of the future.

    Jazz  
  • I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.

    Music   Careers   Sound  
  • As a musician you have to keep one foot back in the past and have one foot forward into the future.

  • I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be.

    Play  
  • Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your magnificent indifference.

    Jazz  
  • I was blessed that I got married early and had a good wife. That sort of kept me straight. Probably I would have been like Charlie Parker, you know, involved in drugs or alcohol or something like that if I hadn't had this stability.

  • You can't steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.

  • It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

    Music   Taken   Play  
    Quoted in N Hentoff Jazz Is (1978).
  • One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

    Music   Jazz   Reason  
  • Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins.

    Sound  
  • I know all the Latin-American rhythms quite well, but I don't play them exactly like they do in their own country - I add my personal touch.

    Play  
  • Miles got a mystique about him-plus he's at the top of his profession. And he's got way, way, way more money.

    Music   Way   Jazz  
  • I used to do a lot of apologizing for what the State Department had done.

    Jazz  
  • I'd like to play for you one of my compositions, my only composition.

    Play   Jazz  
  • Nothing surpasses my performances with small bands, especially with Charlie Parker. A small band doesn't forestall creativity.

    Dizzy Gillespie (2009). “To Be, Or Not-- to Bop”, p.367, U of Minnesota Press
  • I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 33 quotes from the Bandleader Dizzy Gillespie, starting from October 21, 1917! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Dizzy Gillespie quotes about: Jazz Music