Group improvisation is a further challenge.

Aside from the weighty technical

problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for
sympathy from all members to bend for the common result.
(Bill Evans)
So what?
(Miles Davis)
I dont care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.
(Miles Davis)
Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument.
(Bill Evans)
It bugs me when people try to analyze
jazz as an intellectual theorem.
Its not.
Its feeling.
(Bill Evans)
I believe that all people are in possession of
what might be called a universal musical mind.
(Bill Evans)
Sometimes Id think I was making music through
the wrong end of a magnifying glass.
(John Coltrane)
There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He
must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in
such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break
through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must
practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in
communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot
interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of
ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that
escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful
reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique
disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.
(Bill Evans)

I stole everything that I heard, but mostly I stole from the horns
(Ella Fitzgerald)
Ive been told that nobody sings the word hunger like I do.
(Billie Holiday)
Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like
we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going
on to college, to a school of higher learning.
(B. B. King)
My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.
(Cab Calloway)
Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional
performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.
(Bill Evans)
Music is a verb
(Ornette Coleman)
I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won't come out.
(Stan Getz)
When you sing, always tell the truth.
(Billie Holiday)
Start well and end well. The middle will look after itself.
(Stephan Grappelli)
Nothing is so well-prepared as a great spontaneous performance.
(Chuck Israels)

If you're not feeling right, play a minor tune and it falls into place.
(Marian McPartland)

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

(Thelonious Monk)
I never practice my guitar. From time to time
I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.
(Wes Montgomery)
I can play all I know in eight bars.
(Charlie Parker)
A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that.
(Jaco Pastorius)
You blows who you is
(Louis Armstrong)
Nobody plays like me and I don't play like anybody else.
(Coleman Hawkins)
Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.
(Pat Martino)