Chico Hamilton

I don’t dig staying in one groove.

The time is now.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.

If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.

Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that it’s almost as if it’s intertwined with society.

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.

[moving to Las Vegas] It was sort of like a man getting married – you don’t have to go out looking for girls, you’ve got your girl with you. I could go to casinos any time I had money and wanted to, so I actually went less.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.

My music is Jazz.

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.

Last time I saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.