Duke Ellington Quotes

Duke Ellington shares thoughtful, artistic musings on music, creativity, and growth.

56 quotes

1. It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).

2. Playing 'Bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

3. It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

4. Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young.

5. Roaming through the jungle of 'oohs' 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.

6. If it sounds good, it IS good.

7. There's two kinds of music: good and bad. I like both.

8. A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

9. Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

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

11. 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.

12. Gray skies are just clouds passing over.

13. I am a bandleader and I am a composer. I am not a teacher.

14. I don't believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.

15. I don't pursue anything. The only thing I always answer is my own impulse.

16. 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.

17. I live with music.

18. I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

19. I'm a telephone freak, the greatest invention since peanut brittle.

20. I'm the world's worst disciplinarian. There's too much responsibility in being a leader! You have to have the dignity and authority of a leader, and that's all so heavy!

21. 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.

22. Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited.

23. My attitude is never to be satisfied, never enough, never.

24. 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?

25. Now I can say loudly and openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees.

26. Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone.

27. The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

28. There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.

29. There is no art when one does something without intention.

30. You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it.

31. Jazz is music-Swing is business.

32. Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.

33. New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky.

34. Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.

35. The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

36. Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.

40. The artist must say it without saying it.

41. Problems are chances for us to do our best.

42. 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.

43. 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.

44. On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.

45. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.

46. There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

47. 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!

48. Billy Strayhorn is my right arm, my left arm, and the six eyes in the back of my head.

49. The Europeans who went to Africa came back with “modern' art. What is more African than a Picasso?

50. Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don't dance, or who never did dance, don't really understand the beat... I know musicians who don't and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.

51. Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.

52. You've got to find a way of saying it without saying it.

53. 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.

54. I'm sure critics have their purpose, 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 he did.

55. Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.

56. Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.