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It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

Quincy Jones

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Quincy Jones
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 14
Actor
Autobiographer
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Film Producer
Humanitarian
Instrumentalist
Jazz Musician
Jazz Trumpeter
Music Arranger
Chicago
Illinois
Q
Quincy
Quincy Delight Jones Jr.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr
Quincy Jones Jr.
Next
Realized
Music
Ears
Play
Pay
Good
Especially
Reminding
Theory
Printed
Class
Peers
Attention
Classes
Easy
Forth

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A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.
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I've always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, Ain't that the truth.
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My grandmother had this high-tech security system - a rusty nail she used to lock the door.
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You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
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I'm never in my life going to do a record that's a tribute to myself. I don't need it.
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I don't deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn't deserve that, either. So I'll keep it.
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We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.
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You have to know that your real home is within.
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Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.
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I was inspired by a lot of people when I was young, every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. I was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through, because in those days we didn't have MTV, we didn't have television.
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There's power in the collective. If you don't believe me, just watch a symphony orchestra with a conductor and 120 people who are thinking about exactly the same thing at the same moment - no babies, no stock markets, no mortgages. Just 32nd notes.
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I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.
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It's very freaky in Chicago.There's something in the water there, I don't know what it is. But the actual word Chicago means, in the Indian language, garlic. It was just garlic and mosquitoes there. And that is the roughest city on the planet, and I been to every place in the world.
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Communications are making this one world. Back in the day, 400-500 years ago, nobody knew what anyone else was doing. It's on the 6 O'Clock news now. Now we can say, Oh, that's the way they live. Oh, they do that!! Opportunities, the chance to bring about change, it's all based on communication. Communication and jet planes.
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The only music I don't like is bad music.
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A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!
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Let's not get too full of ourselves. Let's leave space for God to come into the room.
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I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.
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My son is a hip-hop producer.
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I was reading Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, L. Ron Hubbard, all sorts of philosophy. Bebop cats are like that. Curious. I wanted to know about everything.
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