Charlie Gillespie Quotes & Sayings

The unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective. — Jon Stewart

Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk — John Lewis

I went up to his [Hank Jones'] house and there were four guys there: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach. Not a bad place to be. Scared shitless, but a nice place to be on my second day in New York. — Ray Brown

Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented this. — Woodrow Wilson

I always think that I'm still this 13-year old boy that doesn't really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I'll really have to do it. — Richard Linklater

I chose to go to law school because I thought that someday, somehow I'd make a difference. — Christopher Darden

Disembodied spirits," said his partner, "are not known to use telephones. Neither are spooks, phantoms, or werewolves."

"That was in the old days. Why shouldn't they change with the times and be modern, too? — Robert Arthur

Dizzy Gillespie recorded it with Charlie Parker in an
influential 1945 track (incorporating a much imitated intro - perhaps initially
intended as a parody of Rachmaninoff 's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor — Ted Gioia

You can't steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it. — Dizzy Gillespie

Nothing surpasses my performances with small bands, especially with Charlie Parker. A small band doesn't forestall creativity. — Dizzy Gillespie

We loved one another, man. I mean all those stories about the rift ... there was no question of a rift between Charlie Parker and me. — Dizzy Gillespie

I was blessed that I got married early and had a good wife. That sort of kept me straight. Probably I would have been like Charlie Parker, you know, involved in drugs or alcohol or something like that if I hadn't had this stability. — Dizzy Gillespie

Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop. — Jack Kerouac

Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and
amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action.
He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in
stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing
gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a
Well-digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the
nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time. — Ralph Ellison

Early mornings were given over to Bartok and Schoenberg. Midmorning I treated myself to the vocals of Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, Louis Jordan and Bull Moose Jackson. A piroshki from the Russian delicatessen next door was lunch and then the giants of bebop flipped through the air. Charlie Parker and Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and Al Haig and Howard McGhee. Blues belonged to late afternoons and the singers' lyrics of lost love spoke to my solitude. — Maya Angelou

Willpower is a muscle that can be strengthened. — Roy Baumeister