Peter Smith Jazz - Education

Words of Wisdom
from everywhere

(added to August 2007)

Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
>Vince Lombardi-football coach.

The only measure of human value is how well you do your work.
Whatever else you do will stem from that.
>Ayn Rand-writer.

Each day I relearn my technique anew.
>Paganinni-vituoso.

Chance favors the prepared. (The trained mind.)
>Louis Pasteur-genius.

Good music is memorized music.
>Paganinni, Toscaninni, Duke Ellington-musicians.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you've mastered you will never grow.
>Ronald Osbourne-writer.

We play as we practice therefore we must practice as we play.
>Jimmy Osbourne.

A professional is one who does his/her best work when s/he feels the least like working.
>Frank Lloyd Wright-architect.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.
>Chinese Proverb.

You cannot build a reputation on what you are going to do.
>Barroom Symposium.

Intuition must lead knowledge or knowledge will flounder.
>Bill Evans-jazz pianist.

Cleverness is no substitute for true awareness.
>Jaco Pastorius-jazz bassist.
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Don't wait for it, don't even want it; just watch it happen.

       Change is constant.
       Learning is ongoing.
       Focus on the journey.
       Follow your heart.
       Access your allies.

Music may achieve the highest of all missions:
She may be a bond between nations, races and states,
who are strangers to one another in many ways;
She may unite what is disunited, And bring peace to what is hostile.
>Dr. Max Bendiner

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
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Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
>Ludwig Van Beethoven

Music is love in search of a word.
>Lanier

Each living flower, the sigh of each bird, and the hidden love within the earth's heart
is the living incarnation of music.
>Samuel A. Weir

If the king loves music, it is well with the land.
>Mencius

Music is the universal language of mankind.
>Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.
>Ernst Levy
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Life is raw material. We are artisans.
We sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness.
It is in our hands.

Some people hear with their eyes.

What you hear on the radio today is one-half marketing, one-half public relations, and two-thirds timing.
And if that math makes sense to you, you probably work in the royalties department at one of the major labels.
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"Musicians have
bigger and more sensitive brains than people who do not play instruments,
scientists revealed yesterday. The auditory cortex, which is the part of the
brain concerned with hearing, contains 130 per cent more 'grey matter' in
professional musicians than in non-musicians," while "in amateur players,
the volume of the auditory cortex is between the two, a team of researchers
from Heidelberg University in Germany has found." The report, in "Nature
Neuroscience," showed the professionals to have "102 per cent more activity
in their auditory cortex than non-musicians. Activity in the brains of
amateur musicians was on average 37 per cent higher than those who did not
play an instrument ... The auditory cortex consists mainly of 'grey matter'
or nerve cells called neurons, which are interconnected by long
filament-like axons, or 'white matter.'"
>Lorna Duckworth, Independent (UK)
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"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action."
>Herbert Spencer

"A master naturally and effortlessly brings forth something inconceivable.
However, without study it is impossible to enter the boundaries of mastery."
>Fuyo Hisamatsu

This music of yours. a manifestation of the highest energy not at all abstract, but without an object, Energy in a void, in pure ether.
Where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself'.
We use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, Such music is energy itself, yet not as idea,
rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. 'Imitatio Dei'.
I am surprised it is not forbidden.
>Thomas Mann (1875-1955), German author, critic.

Music, theoretically considered, consists altogether of lines of tone. It more nearly resembles a picture or an architectural drawing,
than any other art creation; the difference being that in a drawing the lines are visible and constant, while in music they are audible
and in motion. The separate tones are the points through which the lines are drawn; and the impression which is intended,
and which is apprehended by the intelligent listener, is not that of single tones, but of continuous lines of tones,
describing movements,curves and angles, rising, falling, poising; directly analogous to the linear impressions conveyed by
a picture or drawing.
>Percy Goetschius (1853-1943), U.S. music critic.
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Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
>Van Morrison

I love music. It gives you something to listen to while you're watching videos.
>Dennis Miller

If I miss one day's practice, I notice.
If I miss two days practice, the critics notice.
If I miss three days practice, the audience notices it.
> Ignance Paderewsky, Polish statesman and pianist

When a fan said to him after a concert, "I'd give my life to play as you do!" Fritz Kreisler replied, "Madam, I did."

Mediocrity is the enemy of excellence.
>Bobby Sanabria, percussionist

If you can walk you can dance, if you can talk you can sing.
>Zimbabwe proverb

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
>Leopold Stokowski

A true tradition is not the witnessing of a past closed and finished;
it is a living force that animates and informs the present.
>Igor Stravinsky

Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.
>George Foreman

You have to shoot for the stars just to clear the trees.
>John Tapscott

I don't have to hold the audience's hand.
>Miles Davis
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From Matt Mullenweg's collection of Jazz Quotes.

http://photomatt.net/jazzquotes/

"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini."
- Paul Desmond

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

"Jazz is not background music."
- Horace Silver

"I don't do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn't care less. If it sells one, it sells one."
- Oscar Peterson

"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."
- Frank Zappa
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The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
> Carl Jung

Music is a safe kind of high.
> Jimi Hendrix

In memory, everything seems to happen to music.
>Tennessee Williams

Music is an outburst of the soul.
> Frederick Delius
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<>As spoken by Paul Desmond:

"I have won several prizes as the world's slowest alto player, as well as a
special award in 1961 for quietness."

"I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was."

"I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast."

On the secret of his tone: "I honestly don't know! It has something to do
with the fact that I play illegally."

When asked by Gene Lees what accounted for the melancholy in his playing he
replied, "Wellllll, the fact that I'm not playing better."

He was an English major in college. His reason for not pursuing a literary
career, "I could only write at the beach, and I kept getting sand in my
typewriter."

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The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?'
My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'
My answer to that would be, 'No.'
>Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990)

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"The drummer drives. Everybody else rides!"
>Panama Francis

"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be Played night after night but differently each time."
>Ornette Coleman

"We never play anything the same way once. "
>Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians

"Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't."
>Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman

"To be a musician is a curse. To NOT be one is even worse.
>Jack Daney

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve."
>Xavier Cugat

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats."
Victor Borge , playing to a half-filled house in Flint , Michigan.

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together."
>Mel Brooks

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
>Mark Twain

"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently. "
>James Gibbons Hunekar

"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way. "
Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

"Already too loud!"
>Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reach for their instruments.

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. "
>Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

"In opera, there is always too much singing."
Claude Debussy

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that has made giant strides in reverse."
>Bing Crosby

"The bottom line of any country is, 'what did we contribute to the world?' We contributed Louis Armstrong."
>Tony Bennett
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"Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win.
Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins.
This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins."
>Dizzy Gillespie on playing the trumpet