There is never any end. There are always new sounds
to imagine, new feelings to get at, and always there is the need to
keep purifying these feelings and sounds, so we can really see more
and more clearly what we are. But to do that, at each stage, we have
to keep cleaning the mirror.
-- John Coltrane in Down Beat, August 27,
1964, p. 13
Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn't
about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating
they have to be about change.
-- Miles Davis in Miles, the Autobiography,
1989
Music is limitless.
-- Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington. Music is
My Mistress. New York: Da Capo Press, 1973. Page 465.
Jazz has always had a vanguard, performers who
propelled the music in new directions, dismaying generations of fans
content with what they already knew. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton,
Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke, Earl Hines, and Coleman Hawkins were
among the jazz performers of the 1920s, each in his way an avant-garde
musician who helped relegate customary jazz, rag, and blues styles
to the dead ends of the past.
-- Gary Giddins. Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn
of its Second Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Page 301.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
