Take it off! That's some sad __, man. In the first place, I hear some Charlie Parker cliches. . . . They don't even fit. Is that what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee. If there ain't nothing to listen to, they might as well admit it. Just to take something like that and say it's great, because there ain't nothing to listen to, that's like going out and getting a prostitute. [Leonard Feather: This man said he was influenced by Duke Ellington.] I don't give a ! It must be . Right? I don't care who he's inspired by. That __ ain't nothing. In the first place he don't have the - you know, the way you touch a piano. He doesn't have the touch that would make the sound of whatever he thinks of come off. I can tell he's influenced by Duke, but to put the loud pedal on the piano and make a run is very old-fashioned to me. And when the alto player sits up there and plays without no tone . . . That's the reason I don't buy any records.

He works less but he has given Indian music a completely different sound which has worked.

I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such.

Well, I like to think about what Louis Armstrong and also Duke Ellington said about music. There'are only two kinds of music: good and bad... And, I would like to think about my music as being good.

Lambert, who admired Duke Ellington and proclaimed his harmonic roots in Frederick Delius (who in his turn had taken them from Debussy), was a fearless reconciler of what the academies and Tin Pan Alley alike presumed to be eternally opposed…In 1972, on a plane from New York to Toronto, I found myself sitting next to Duke Ellington, who spoke almost with tears in his eyes of the stature of Lambert.

I phoned Prince out of the blue, hummed a melody, and he listened," … "I hung up, and he came over within the hour. He listened again, and I said, 'Do you hate it?' He said, 'No,' and walked over to the synthesizers that were set up, was absolutely brilliant for about twenty five minutes, and then left. He was so uncanny, so wild, he spoiled me for every band I've ever had because nobody can exactly re-create—not even with two piano players-what Prince did all by his little self.

He could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll.

Prokofiev was not alone among the leading composers of the twentieth century in changing his style repeatedly in the course of his career: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, and others modified their musical language drastically at various stages of their creative lives. In Prokofiev’s case, he always maintained certain stylistic facets throughout the transformations of his musical language.

Chopin's exquisite ear saved him from the ugly repetition of thick chords in the bass that frequently disfigure the work of Mendelssohn, Weber, and Hummel—and even of Field.

What is amazing about Paul is that his life’s work continues even today. What trumpet player Clark Terry stated of Duke Ellington applies equally well to Paul.

He was a one-of-a-kind singer. A lot of guys nowadays try to sound like him, but nobody can sound like him.

It's a good book. yeah, he’s a—Wolfe's a genius. He did a lot of that stuff, he was only around three weeks. He picked up that amount of dialogue and verisimilitude without a tape recorder, without taking notes to any extent. He just watches very carefully and remembers. But, you know, he's got his own editorial filter there. And so what he's coming up with is part of me, but it's not all of me.

That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality.