Dizzy Gillespie Quotes

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

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

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

The idea of life is to give and receive.

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.

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

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

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

They’re not particular whether you’re playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

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.

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

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

I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds.

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

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

There have been two great revelations in my life: The first was bepop, the second was homeopathy.

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.

Jazz will be the classical music of the future.

Where there’s no mutual respect, there’s trouble!

I’d like to play for you one of my compositions, my only composition.

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

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.