Joe Williams

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

It’s not that you want to sing, it’s that you have to sing.

Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together and the aesthetic, romantic transference.

The louder they [the band] play the softer I sing.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

I never wanted to be like other blues singers. I might like hearing them play, but I’ve never wanted to be anyone other than myself. There are a few people that I’ve wished I could play like, but when I tried, it didn’t work.

A wise man practices slowly; but a wiser man practices even slower.

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

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

[on Django Reinhardt] This was a man who changed my musical life by giving me a whole new perspective on the guitar and, on an even more profound level, on my relationship with sound…During my formative years, as I listened to Django’s records, especially songs like ‘Nuages’ that I would play for the rest of my life, I studied his technique. Even more, I studied his gentleness. I love the human sound he gave his acoustic guitar.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

Music should never be harmless.

The deeper you get into the music allows the ability to appreciate art and all other forms of expression.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.

You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.