John Mayall

I do the best I can with any instrument I get attracted to. But they’re just tools in order for you to express yourself and that’s really the upshot of it.

I’ve never thought the blues was a matter of copying other people. The blues singer should sing songs about his own life. And once the ball got rolling, I felt confident enough to do that as well as cover other people’s songs, and the tributes. You’ve got to think about representing your own life in the music, and for me that meant bringing in an element of jazz; I was brought up on jazz, it was my father’s work, it was in the house.

Joe’s been my drummer for 14 years, and we’ve been buddies for six years.

I get most of my news from the Jon Stewart Daily Show. It’s the most level commentary you can find. You have to laugh, because it’s all so true. It’s the closest thing to a counterculture.

If you have something in your life worth celebrating, you can put it in a blues song.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not, it’s feeling.

Risk is at the heart of Jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

Eliminating the piano means that I’ve always worked closer with the bass than most players.

I think we musicians are emissaries. Every time we go before the public, we’re there to make converts.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

You’ve got to be willing to put stuff on the line, otherwise it doesn’t have much meaning.

Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back… your attention.

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

I worked until I could play and do changes at any tempo in any key and said ‘What else is there?’ Now I’m finding out.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

I have no elitist concepts about Jazz. I would not be the musician I am today without experiencing invaluable music styles that are at the roots of African American black life and culture.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

Unless I really loved it and felt really passionate about it, I would just kind of abort the song and start a new one.

If there is no dance, there is not music.

I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.