23 Paul Desmond Quotes

Paul Desmond quotes

1. I could only write at the beach, and I kept getting sand in my typewriter.

2. I hate the way he writes. I kind of love the way he lives, though.

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

4. I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

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

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

7. It's like living in a house where everything's painted red.

8. Not for me. If I want to tune everybody out, I just take off my glasses and enjoy the haze.

9. Sometimes I get the feeling that there are orgies going on all over New York City, and somebody says, `Let's call Desmond,' and somebody else says,'Why bother? He's probably home reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.'

10. Well, that I'm not playing better.

11. Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

12. You're beginning to sound like a cross between David Frost and David Susskind, and that is a cross I cannot bear.

1. The qualities in music which I considered most important - and still do - were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity.

2. We used to get on planes, and they'd ask who we were, and we'd say, 'The Dave Brubeck Quartet', and they'd say, 'Who?' In later years they'd say, 'Oh', which amounts to the same thing.

3. I would like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

4. I would also like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

5. We're working as if it were going out of style-which of course it is.

6. Our basic audience begins with creaking elderly types of twenty-three and above.

7. I discovered early in life that if you take gym first period, you can go into the wrestling room and sit in the corner and sleep.

8. I was overlooked long before anyone knew who I was.

9. Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

10. Complexity can be a trap. You can have a ball developing a phrase, inverting it, playing it in different keys and times and all. But it's really more introspective than communicative. Like a crossword puzzle compared to a poem.

11. It was never supposed to be a hit. It was supposed to be a Joe Morello drum solo,