Dizzy Gillespie Quotes

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

Now, our music is universal. It shares the rhythmic content of African music, music of the Western Hemisphere and various lands of the East, and has merged this rhythm with European harmonies, the soul of the slaves, the blues, and the spirituals to create jazz.

When I first heard Charlie Parker, I said, ‘That’s how our music should be played.’… After we got it together, yeah, I knew we were making something new. It was magic. Nobody on the planet was playing like that but us.