Bill Dixon Quotations

While everyone has a right to his or her opinion, the people who are informed have more of a right.

I think people who sample are cheating. It is like people who do collages. Use all of your own stuff.

I do not, as a rule, do encores. When I have finished playing, I have indeed finished playing. I have nothing left; there has been no reserve.

I have been using delay and reverberation since the middle 1960s. I use them to make what is almost inaudible to the ear, audible. I do not use them to play loudly but to make the higher harmonics heard.

I have been going to Italy since 1980, but I always went to do work. I did not live overseas, because I do not like running around with everything I own in a paper bag.

Whatever I do, I attempt to do it fully. I try, and don't always succeed, to be thorough. There are musicians who do not know their worth, and if they knew it at one time, it has eluded them. I know my worth. You try not to dwell in the past.

Whether I get adequate attention or not, people here do know the work I have been doing systematically and without compromise for over 40 years. I get tired of people making excuses for guys who don't continue the art because they can't make a living.

If I had money, I would like to get an old building, have music performances, do lithographs, have shows of paintings, and do those things that I'm interested in doing.

In the middle 1940s... I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be.

Interested listeners have only to hear the recording to find out if those guys, who go to such pains to undervalue my work, are right. All people have to do is listen to realize it is a beautiful record.

When Coltrane died, a void appeared in this music that has not been filled yet. He maintained a forward motion in his work and did not look back.

I have no distributor... it is indicative to me that there are these pockets of players and collectors all over. You should see the correspondence I get from over the world letting me know how significant they think I am. I know that wherever I go, I am well received.

If I produce it, I will stage it as a performance. A small audience will be invited; rehearsals of the sections will be done in the mornings, and those sections will be recorded in the afternoons.

If you are you, 24 hours a day, then you do not have to remember who you are supposed to be in different situations - something that I imagine could be troublesome.

Most of my recorded material has been in small group configurations. I have not released large orchestral works as recordings because it hasn't been within the realm of possibility.

My career has been different from most people, but I knew what I was not going to do. I knew I was not going to be controlled. I knew there was a price for this, but I did not know there was as large a price as it turned out to be.

Rock musicians, and a vast array of popular-music musicians, due to their wealth, acquired through the mass of their notoriety, are able to be listened to and heard and thus are able to effect change on an international level.

The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won't succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.

We're at bare bone now. There is no fat here, ... There has never been any fat here.

I have hundreds of hours of this music on tape performed by orchestras at the college that, as I said, have never seen the light of any other day.

I did not make my first recording until I was 37... I did not even start to study music until I was 20... I entered music at a time when New York was this cauldron of incredible artistic and cultural activity.

I come from a generation where the dreams and aspirations of a whole lot of young men were sacrificed at the altar of getting some kind of menial job.

If, when making reference to a larger musical grouping, you say orchestra, you can readily expect that they will seek to correct you and let you know that it's really a big band. Continued insistence over the years has only served to make those people think you are being pedantic.

He gave so much of his time. He made three or four trips out here, a week at a time from January to March. He was extremely popular wherever we put him.

I think Russ has catapulted himself above other Democrats nationally.

Fear is the biggest motivator.

When it comes to this music, it just seems to be a foregone conclusion that there is going to be some kind of excuse for things not being able to be implemented that are deemed necessary for the successful realization of the music. I know that this is sounding clumsy and that it could easily be misinterpreted, but one doesn't have to be a brain trust to make the observation that I've just made.

There was a bunch of rockets and stuff, like toy rockets, models and stuff like that.

Originally I was asked to do something with the very talented percussionist Susie Ibarra, but I had to decline since I am not involved in the women's movement in music.

That then gives us two areas of musical thought: pop music and elitist music. Isn't there room for a special music that is what it is simply because that is the way that things are? There is always going to be different forms of music. I do not think we should put down rap music and things like that. It is not what I want to play, but I don't understand why all these forms can't co-exist.

The next Charlie Parker is out there somewhere. He is not in one of these schools. He is not getting any of these grants. This music desperately needs to be subsidized so that the people who are trying to do something and have no access can have access to something. I was on one of the National Endowment Panels some years ago and it was an eye-opener to actually witness the selection process in operation.

The bass provides a sort of liquid foundational formation that does not gravitationally tie you down. It is good at revealing and highlighting a certain harmonic pinpoint when one is either being looked for or needed.

I walked up on a pipe that had two end caps on it. It looked like a pipe bomb to me, so I told the officers, they called the bomb and arson squad out, and they just detonated it and it was an explosive device.

It went pretty good. They seemed more than willing to try to work with the neighborhood to accommodate everybody.

The Canadians, by the paucity of invitations that have been extended to me to do things there, have obviously never been that enamored with my work.

In certain areas of this music, especially since the 1960s - and that is no coincidence - certain people have been singled out for attention and the others have been totally ignored to the extent that the interested music public has been made to believe that they no longer exist.

If musicians don't do any music, then there isn't any music. Musicians are very tricky and can be quite elusive.

If you think about it, $100,000 in terms of a recording is not a lot of money. For musicians who are cranking out a lot of this uninteresting commercial music, it is not unusual for that amount of money to be allocated for the lunch commemorating the signing of one of their recording contracts.

I am not interested in petty gossip; I am not interested in who sells the most records and the politicizing of economics that makes that possible. I am not interested in a body politic of the largely uninformed who attempt to politically designate certain people as deserving of wider recognition.

The idea of the nightclub as a supported and supportive venue for the creation of music is as outdated and outmoded as an idea as even thinking about it as a venue for the creation of the music. A nightclub is a place where you are supposed to have fun and drink and carry on.