You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.–Charlie Parker
If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats.–Charles Mingus
I had a flash along the lines of that Parker statement once, while at a David Murray concert: there he was, a few feet from me, blowing hard (with John Hicks and Ray Drummond, if I remember correctly, though I don’t remember who the drummer was; it was at a club in SF), and it struck me how he had practiced and played for up to thirty years at that point in order to be able to just play.
He knits chorus after chorus
from the yarn of thirty years
of practicing, so many seconds
invisible in every stitch.