Bley Quotes

#1. Sometimes I feel like a deperson.

Leah Raeder

#2. Listening is more important than anything else because that's what music is. Somebody is playing something and you're receiving it. It is sending and receiving.

Carla Bley

#3. I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats.

Paul Bley

#4. A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#5. Within each person is the miracle of a unique consciousness unlike any other in the universe.

Bryant McGill

#6. One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

Carla Bley

#7. I believe that human beings are born first and given passports later. I'm really thankful for my journey. And it's a journey I didn't design.

Alfonso Cuaron

#8. I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

Carla Bley

#9. I think all record companies should be run by a musician. Just as you wouldn't trust your health to an electrician.

Paul Bley

#10. There are times when what's happening in rock is the best music in the world, and there are times when there is nothing worthwhile at all.

Carla Bley

#11. When I arrived in New York I was definitely the worst player in town! It was just a measure of how far I had to go. It took years, while I was at Juilliard I worked different weekends with different people.

Paul Bley

#12. I write very slowly.

Carla Bley

#13. Appreciate your personality! Celebrate who you are.You are Too-Much.

Anyaele Sam Chiyson

#14. I don't think you can ever regain your ignorance.

Carla Bley

#15. I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.

Carla Bley

#16. He gazed at me with kindness and pity. "To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil." I turned

Sue Monk Kidd

#17. I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

Carla Bley

#18. It would be really hard to get serious about anything political today unless it was a joke.

Carla Bley

#19. It's terrifying. It's so scary, because you get used to being around the crew and being friendly with everyone and then suddenly, at a certain point, everything switches and you're the one standing behind the lights and nobody's going to help you. And that can be really difficult sometimes.

Liv Tyler

#20. Adam Berenson knows how to compose, organize an ensemble, do musical research, play solo and trio piano, write for musical journals, and enlist others to his cause. A very fine musician.

Paul Bley

#21. I think we've all had enough of Coltrane saxophonists. There's a case of someone ruining a generation of saxophonists, as Louis Armstrong may have ruined a generation of trumpeters.

Paul Bley

#22. When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

Carla Bley

#23. War is something of man's own fostering, and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.

A.A. Milne

#24. If the doctrine of a church is that people outside of Christ will face an eternity in hell, yet the culture is one that does not celebrate conversions or evangelistic witness, the culture of the church will contradict its doctrinal stance by continually focusing inward instead of outward.

Matt Chandler

#25. When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.

Carla Bley

#26. A man content to go to heaven alone will never go to heaven.

Boethius

#27. What's interesting about a person without problems?

Carla Bley

#28. I don't need much coaxing.

Carla Bley

#29. When you have 13 horns, and one is soloing, you have 12 people to play the richest, fullest chord you could ever imagine behind that solo.

Carla Bley

#30. I don't enjoy traveling in America. I don't like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.

Carla Bley

#31. Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

Carla Bley

#32. Now as jazz musicians we're saying for this society, you can free up your imagination. You can proceed in an area without much information and you can function in an area without much information.

Paul Bley

#33. Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Carla Bley

#34. The hafts of the tools were stained black with th sweat of us all, our contributions, black and white alike.

M T Anderson

#35. I got started when I was 3 years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk, you learn to play the piano.

Carla Bley