Louis Armstrong

There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad. I play the good kind.

You blows who you is.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.

I loved the feeling that I got singing.

Music is like wine, the less you know about it the sweeter you like it. 

The only thing better than singing is more singing.

I feel like….Music is the – it’s the answer. It’s the reason.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

There’s always room for improvisation or changes of expression.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

We’re here to have a ball.

I became a singer to sing my songs. They’re so hip who else is going to sing them?

It’s just exciting to be part of something that is brand-new.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?