Top 100 Quotes About Duke Ellington
#1. He went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.
Jo Nesbo
#2. I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.
Steve Lacy
#3. You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually.
Herbert
#4. [Prince] could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll.
Miles Davis
#5. It's like Duke Ellington said, there are only two kinds of music - good and bad. And you can tell when something is good.
Ray Charles
#6. Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole. "Mona Lisa, men have named you,
George Hodgman
#7. Duke Ellington always had a style: original, clean with interesting color combinations. He had an artist's eye.
Wynton Marsalis
#8. I learned from Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall, the Nicholas Brothers, the whole thing, the whole schmear. [The Cotton Club] was a great place because it hired us, for one thing, at a time when it was really rough [for Black performers].
Lena Horne
#9. At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.
Miles Davis
#10. Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!
Dave Brubeck
#11. As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke.
B.B. King
#12. My inspiration comes from the message Duke Ellington gave - you are unique, be yourself, put out that thing that is you, then use your work ethic and produce great music.
Kenny Burrell
#13. As Duke Ellington put it, Henderson "was liberal in giving away his ideas to people. So liberal, in fact, that it is difficult to recognize the original Fletcher Henderson through his flock of imitators."3
Jeffrey Magee
#14. You know, I always when people ask me, like, what is my most favorite song, I quote Duke Ellington, when they would ask him, what's his favorite composition? And I say, I haven't written it yet. Because, you know, there are different songs for different occasions.
Stevie Wonder
#15. I like to think Duke Ellington would probably embrace a fragrance as well.
Bryan Ferry
#16. A few years later, my Uncle David took me to the Earle Theatre to hear Duke Ellington.
David Amram
#17. So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops.
Ed Smith
#18. The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me."
Wynton Marsalis
#19. When I got through, Duke Ellington stood up and started the applause.
Ruth Brown
#20. As Duke Ellington once said, "There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind." In that sense, jazz and classical music are fundamentally the same. The pure joy one experiences listening to "good" music transcends questions of genre.
Haruki Murakami
#21. It's a spirit that was given me and the relationships and meeting all these great people, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong; through Max I met a lot of people too. My first album was with Benny Carter.
Abbey Lincoln
#22. I remember the night when I was playing at Birdland, and Duke Ellington walked in wearing that cap of his and with all his elegance. The Duke then came backstage, and I was there with my band. That's the one thing I miss.
Maynard Ferguson
#23. I think it was Duke Ellington who once said that we're always most pleased with our current record. I mean, you have to assume that you learn from one, and you do something better next time.
George Shearing
#24. Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging
but that weren't sweet.
Miles Davis
#25. I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.
Steve Lacy
#26. Duke Ellington was famous for hs very original harmonic patterns.
Lawrence Welk
#27. It really was truth or consequences, and Billy went with truth. It was just incredible." Forsaking public prominence, Strayhorn found personal freedom in service to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Now there might not be a Billy Strayhorn Orchestra. But there was a Billy Strayhorn.
David Hajdu
#28. I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such.
Cannonball Adderley
#29. There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.
Boris Vian
#31. Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.
Ice Cube
#32. I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too.
Dave Smalley
#33. I especially like Duke Ellington jazz, which is a little more ... I lived in New York for a while. I lived in Harlem for a bit, and I just fell in love with the idea of that era of New York, that jazz era, especially jazz in Harlem.
Charlie Day
#34. I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.
Mose Allison
#35. If I were to put on Barbra Streisand and Duke Ellington, one might say the combination isn't good.
Norman Granz
#36. Count Basie was college, but Duke Ellington was graduate school.
Clark Terry
#37. Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.
Duke Ellington
#38. Of the One O'Clock Lab Band after hearing their performance, and sitting in with them at the White House: "I wish it were mine".
Duke Ellington
#41. There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.
Duke Ellington
#42. Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone.
Duke Ellington
#44. New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillac's, and the beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses.
Duke Ellington
#45. Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.
Duke Ellington
#46. Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
Duke Ellington
#47. My biggest kick in music -playing or writing- is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?
Duke Ellington
#48. Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.
Duke Ellington
#49. You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it.
Duke Ellington
#51. There are two kinds of worries - those you can do something about and those you can't. Don't spend any time on the latter.
Duke Ellington
#52. My mother told me I was blessed, and I have always taken her word for it. Being born of - or reincarnated from - royalty is nothing Like being blessed. Royalty is inherited from another
human being; blessedness comes from God.
Duke Ellington
#53. New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky.
Duke Ellington
#54. Now I can say loudly and openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees.
Duke Ellington
#55. I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
Duke Ellington
#57. I like any and all of my associations with music -writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.
Duke Ellington
#58. My attitude is never to be satisfied, never enough, never.
Duke Ellington
#59. It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.
Duke Ellington
#61. The common root, of course, comes out of Africa. That's the pulse.The African pulse. It's all the way back from ... the old slave chants and up through the blues, the jazz, and up through rock. And it's all got the African pulse.
Duke Ellington
#63. You've got to find a way of saying it without saying it.
Duke Ellington
#64. Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.
Duke Ellington
#65. Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.
Duke Ellington
#66. San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus of the world - one of the really urbane communities in the United States - one of the truly cosmopolitan places and for many, many years, it always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world
Duke Ellington
#69. Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.
Duke Ellington
#70. There is no art when one does something without intention.
Duke Ellington
#71. Somehow I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself.
Duke Ellington
#72. You can't write music right unless you know how the man that'll play it plays poker.
Duke Ellington
#73. You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it's bad.
Duke Ellington
#74. I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King's son.
Duke Ellington
#76. If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.
Duke Ellington
#77. There are 2 rules in life:
Number 1- Never quit
Number2- Never forget rule number 1.
Duke Ellington
#78. Hurry, get on board, it's comin', listen to those rails a-thrumming all aboard. Get on the "A" train, soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem.
Duke Ellington
#79. It doesn't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing
Duke Ellington
#81. The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me, so extraordinary a musician is he.
Duke Ellington
#82. There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed.
Duke Ellington
#84. The Europeans who went to Africa came back with modern' art. What is more African than a Picasso?
Duke Ellington
#85. If you have a great band with a mediocre drummer, you have a mediocre band. If you have a mediocre band with a great drummer, you have a great band!
Duke Ellington
#86. It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line
Duke Ellington
#87. There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.
Duke Ellington
#88. The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
Duke Ellington
#89. The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.
Duke Ellington
#90. Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.
Duke Ellington
#92. Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven't; there's no proof of it.
Duke Ellington
#93. Roaming through the jungle of "Ohs" and "Ahs" searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.
Duke Ellington
#95. Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian.
Duke Ellington
#96. By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.
Duke Ellington
#97. I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington
#98. Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
Duke Ellington
#100. Love is supreme and unconditional. Like is nice, but limited.
Duke Ellington
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