Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing and instrumental personality.

Man, you tell a story.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

The Blues contain so much joy and sadness at the same time.

It’s either hip or it ain’t.

Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.

I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody’s interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

As long as musicians have passion for spontaneity and creating something that’s never been before, Jazz will flourish.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.

We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.

Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

You blows who you is.