Duke Ellington Music Quotations

Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.

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.

Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

Gray skies are just clouds passing over.

A musical profit outweighs a financial loss.

It's like an act of murder-you play with intent to commit something.

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.

New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky.

Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

Roaming through the jungle of "Ohs" and "Ahs" searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

A goal is a dream with a finish line.

There is no art without intention.

There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.

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.

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

Music is the tonal reflection of beauty.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

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

You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

in recognition of his musical genius, which evoked aesthetically the principles of democracy through the medium of jazz and thus made an indelible contribution to art and culture.

A problem is your chance to do your best.

There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!

You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it's bad.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven't; there's no proof of it.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

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.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.