Louis Armstrong

Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

Never play anything the same way twice.

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.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

I’m more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I’m very proud of my hands.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

Jazz amounts to Blues, your unique sound and the elusive genius of improvisation.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

Breathe…. breathe a lot!

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

Django Reinhardt was fantastic. he must have been playing all the time to be that good.

All music is beautiful.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

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

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.