Tenor Quotes

Some people say there was no jazz tenor before me. All I know is I just had a way of playing and I didn't think in terms of any other instrument but the tenor.

They would wake me up when I was sleeping, and say sing a song for our friends. I had a sweet voice, I had a nice little tenor voice. God knows what I sang, but my whole family would admire me.

The tenor of the comments as we got closer and closer to August got dominated by 'Wouldja please get this over with' and not let us go into default.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

You got to play the flute as a flute, like that. You can't play like a tenor concept on soprano; it sounds wrong. But some guys do it, and they think it's O.K., but not so!

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

Bud Johnson, God rest his soul of fame, a tenor saxophonist. Bud was always a big, big, big booster of mine and he always when I first met Bud in Pittsburgh when he came through there, he heard me sing and he wanted me to come to Chicago.

I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.

You have to make a choice when you start to sing and decide whether you want to service the music, and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.

In reply, I can only plead that a discovery which seems to contradict the general tenor of previous investigations is naturally received with much hesitation.

I don't know what I was trying to get out of a tenor - but it never really satisfied me until one day I picked up my alto and I said, "Where have you been?" and I said right here for now on!

The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity.

My father was a Norwegian tenor and my mother a New York Irish librarian.

The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing.

A superb tenor voice, like a silver trumpet muffled in silk.

I made the tenor sax - there's nobody plays like me and I don't play like anybody else.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

Even in today's opera world, the position of the black tenor is problematic.

I'm a farmer with a mandolin and a high tenor voice.

When I was a young man, I was a baritone, very far from possessing the whole range of the tenor then.

Then, of course, I played alto and tenor, wherever there were jobs.

I am a tenor buff. I hear myself.