Words matter. These are the best Wayne Shorter Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Music is just sound – what’s more important to me is behavior. I’m watching these play-offs – basketball – it’s interesting to watch behavior, underneath all the movements and everything like that. They go into the audience and show some of the parents of the players and all that.
I always say that music is a small drop in the ocean of life. I was told a long time ago that your horn, or whatever instrument you play, is a means to be in the world.
You’re like the girl who left her shadow in the drawer, but when she went to get it, it wasn’t there.
Jazz is a fighter. The word ‘jazz’ means to me, ‘I dare you. Let’s jump into the unknown!’
I’m trying to do music which inspires the desire to transcend politics, which has a limited and selfish and egoist and unknowledgable end about what anyone knows about existence.
There’s a steady forward march of a creative process that some of us stay with and don’t give up – that should be an admirable thing – from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to Miles to Ornette and some people who are not even known today – some kids coming up – people who are out to change the world.
When John Coltrane passed, we were in the church for the memorial. Albert Ayler came walking in playing, real out there. He was actually mourning through his horn. Mourning, but it was also like a call to wake up. Wake up!
I would pass this music store on the way to school, and there was a clarinet in the window, a second-hand one. And I kept asking my parents to buy it, and eventually they did. I still have it now.
I’m making strides to have dialogue with life. I’m walking down a garden path, something like that. And you’re looking at the trees, and then you start to look at them through your inner eye.
I think that music opens portals and doorways into unknown sectors that it takes courage to leap into. I always think that there’s a potential that we all have, and we can emerge, rise up to this potential, when necessary. We have to be fearless, courageous, and draw upon wisdom that we think we don’t have.
There are colors we can’t see, but they’re connected to the ones we can, There’s a connection between everything.
When we were kids, our parents would let us play outside all day, and there was a horse-drawn milk wagon that could become anything in my mind, like a spaceship or something.
I believe in everyone staying as they are, and when you meld together, you get something more accurate and democratic.
I think the music that’s called ‘future stuff’ is the soundtrack to the few people who have the nerve and the courage to continue, to go to the end of the line and not be deterred.
When they say ‘jazz,’ I’m thinking of a word called ‘the creative process.’ It intersects every vein and tributary, avenue, path, that everyone’s living. It crosses through there, but it’s been contained.
A lot of people don’t know that Beethoven, when he wrote the Fifth Symphony, that second movement, he took eight years to figure that out!
It’s up to the person who’s being creative to find ways to emerge and shake up the world of wealth.
