John McLaughlin

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

It’s not what you do, but the way you’re doing it and in the end that’s all that we have.

Indian music is very soulful and the only other school that develops improv to the high degree you find in Jazz.

Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.

I think pop music is one of the few things in the 20th century that have made giant strides in reverse.

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

Music is to the soul what water is to the body.

To work is to feel alive.

When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.

Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general.

My music had roots which I’d dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.

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.

Love is sweeping the country.

And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.

10% of musicians make 90% of the money, while the remaining 90% of musicians make the 10% that’s left.

Your ear is the final judge to what sounds right and what sounds wrong.

I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I’m about to get.