Summertime, and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high…

I had in mind a look at the relationship between jazz and complexity theory for the summer issue of Random Riffs. Then I heard Ella Fitzgerald singing Summertime and thought better of it … too heavy a topic for the season of iced tea, gazpacho and potato salads. I still intend to do it, but I’ve decided to wait until the real new year grinds to its tediously earnest start in September.

The other thing I decided about this summer issue was to let some other voices be heard; voices from the world of jazz. A nice change for both of us, I think.

Dave Holland
“I want dialogue. The quality of community in ensemble is central to everything I’ve done. Jazz is an in-the-moment narrative, and it’s different every time. No other music in the Western world is like that.”

Stan Getz
“There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.”

Bill Mays – in response to a question about what it’s like to work with musicians he’s never played with before …
“If they’re egoless and fearless, it’ll be fine.”

Bill Evans
“First of all, I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.”

Billie Holiday
“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.”

Charles Mingus
“Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.”

Charlie Parker
“Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that s__t and just play.”

Coleman Hawkins
“If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.”

Dave Kitoski
“For me, the main thing is spontaneity and taking chances. You have to study and know the traditions, but then you have to play things that haven’t been played before. It becomes a balance of knowing the tradition and using your own original voice to add to it.”

Dizzy Gillespie
“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.”

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

Herbie Hancock
“A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.”

Oscar Peterson
“It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.”

Joshua Redman
We all have to open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to try and arrive at something new. If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn’t be playing anything of depth.

Sonny Rollins
I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.

Frank Zappa
“Jazz isn’t dead … it just smells funny.”

Until September, then.

Brian

July
29

Getting in the Groove