"'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music."
"I wanted to resign from the planet, not just music. It stopped being fun with success. Money got in the way. Everybody got greedy, including me. Fear set in. I got miserable when I became a commodity."
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Source: The Arthur Waley Estate, Arthur Waley (2012). “Chinese Poems”, p.177, Routledge
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"If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much."
"Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper... a windshield wiper that's fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing 'Melancholy Baby' and you've got dance music."
"If you wanna dance, a windshield wiper'll do it-all you need is a beat."
"That's the clarinet I used to use... but it's just a piece of wood, you know, with holes in it and they put these clumsy keys on it and you're supposed to try to take that and manipulate it with throat muscles and chops... and try to make something happen that never happened before. And when you do, you never forget it. It beats sex, it beats anything."
"I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less."