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Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.
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.
Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar. When I get too much to drink, I can’t even finger well, let alone play decent ideas. … You can miss the most important years of your life, the years of possible creation.
That’s the same advice he gave Sonny Criss: “don’t think; quit thinking.” But a more topical Bird quotation is from Lennie Tristano: “…if Charlie Parker wanted to invoke plagiarism laws he could sue almost everybody who’s made a record in the last ten years.”
…or as Mingus titled one song: “If Charlie Parker were a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats”…!