Stan Getz Quotes

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won't come out.

I practiced saxophone eight hours a day for the first two years I played.

You know, when I'm playing, I think of myself in front of the Wailing Wall with a saxophone in my hands, and I'm davening, I'm really telling it to the Wall.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn't have a choice.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody.

I came from an era when we didn't use electronic instruments. The bass wasn't even amplified. The sound was the sound you got.

I never consciously tried to conceive of what my sound should be.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

I compulsively reach for perfection in music, often at the expense of everything else in my life.

I've always regretted the fact that I've never formally studied and learned the mechanics of writing music.

I learn something new every day.

I've done some dastardly things but what can I do except make amends and apologize?

I appreciate men like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins very much.

I learn something new every day - to edit, to take out all the extraneous matter and stress form, logic, and content. I try to play beautiful music.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

Hearing myself so much all the time, I don't think I sound that special all the time because it's me.

My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.

I never have any trouble playing anything I can think of. The trouble is in thinking of what to play.