Lionel Hampton

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.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

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.

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

The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.

I went back and listened to the first three albums I made and tried to figure out what was special about them, why people keep going back to them. I think it was because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea if they were going to play it on the radio or anything. All I did was write songs, so that’s what I got back to.

The truth is I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.

I am a devout musician.

To rise above the crowd, discipline yourself unceasingly to the strict demand and realities of your ambition.

Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

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

Rather than say I play Jazz, I simply say I play music.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

You’ve heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better’n I can, play the blues better’n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.

As a young cellist I had played to an audience that had included Pablo Casals and reacted with poor, nervous playing. Casals sought me out after the concert and praised me highly, somewhat easing the pain and thinking him a very kind man.

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

There are a million good tunes.

When you listen to a pianist, each notes should have an identity, each note should have a soul of its own.

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.