Lionel Hampton

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

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

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.

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

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

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I’m contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don’t come in with lyrics… I just go in and let it happen.

The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.

Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.

I remember going to sleep many nights with a Gibson catalog, dreaming about getting a Les Paul. I finally did, with a loan from my Dad. It’s a really heavy instrument. But it plays like butter. I met Les backstage at a show once. Jeff Beck made me play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ for Les, which was a little embarrassing. He changed history, big-time.

If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.

A Jazz performance centers upon the process of creation. The final objective is not only the finished product, but the path and process taken towards it.

You can cage the singer but not the song.

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don’t know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument.

Jazz musicians are the only workers who will put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.

Jazz music is haunted by its own hungry ghosts.

Jazz can only enhance the Classical side and Classical can only enhance the Jazz side.

The beauty of Jazz is that it’s malleable. People address it to suit their own personalities.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.