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“PRACTICE, and play. Play any kind of music anywhere, weddings, carnivals, dances, circuses. Play and make sure that you give it your best. Be the best out there. I've played burlesque shows and recently I played a parade, right down Broadway in New York. Get a job, take it, be there on time.” —Elvin Jones, 1974 clinic Q&A The Joe Brazil Project blog has shared the entire interview , which is worth reading. 

I’d go to the bin, I’d get two fourteens, I’d go to the eighteen bin, get an eighteen, then I’d go to the twenty bin and get a twenty, and that was that—none of that banging and trying. — Elvin Jones, interview with Chip Stern He's talking about visiting the warehouse where K. Zildjian cymbals fresh off the boat from Istanbul were kept, where all the New York players went to get their cymbals. I've read more than one account of the extreme variability of those cymbals— there were great instruments, but evidently a lot of quite bad ones, too. Elvin continues: You know, what’s that anyway? I mean, first of all, you have to play the cymbal just as you would have to play a trumpet, and so it doesn’t really matter if it’s gold or silver or brass or steel, you know. If you’ve got a good mouthpiece you can play it. So I never did believe in going through that whole charade of listening to the vibrations and the ding-ding-ding; that seemed to me to be so superfluous, because it’s th...

[F]ifty years ago, long [running gigs] were more commonplace. Oh, yeah. There was a club on 52nd Street called the Hickory House. I played in there for three months with Bill Evans, and for three months again with Joe Castro, a piano player. I remember playing 10 weeks with Lennie Tristano at the Half Note. Nine weeks at the Vanguard with Bill Evans and Gary Peacock. One or two weeks or more at the original Birdland. That's the way it was, then. [...] According to your gig book, you first worked the Vanguard maybe at the end of '56?  '57. With Lee Konitz. That was the first time I played there. In those days, they'd have two bands. The Bill Evans Trio opposite the Miles Davis band. We played opposite Mingus. They'd have comedians. I played there with Bill Evans opposite Lenny Bruce. The place was never that full! One night with Bill and Scott LaFaro, there were only three people in the club. Now it's packed. It's unbelievable. It's quiet, and they clap w...

“I play music and I play rhythms. I play them and I work on it because I hear something, then I just go sit down and start working on it. It’s like when my wife first asked, I’d be writing music all the time, she’d say ‘What are you going to be doin’ with all that music?’ ‘l don’t know…’ I just know that I be hearin’ it and if I keep writin’ it, it’s going to come. It’s like a dream, if you don’t write it then, you won’t write it. You just keep doing that man, you know?” — Ronald Shannon Jackson That pretty much sums up the entirety of the life of an artist. That's from Michael Bettine's remembrance of, and interview with, the late, great Ronald Shannon Jackson , from Bettine's blog  Percussion Deconstruction. It's also a nice overview of Jackson's recorded work, if you're just getting acquainted with him, and are wondering what to buy— though he doesn't mention my favorite RSJ record (after Barbeque Dog ), Decode Yourself: “Play like you play at home when ...