Nat King Cole

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

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

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

I’m not playing for other musicians. We’re trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We’ll keep him happy.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, ‘Yes, where are you going?’ And he says, ‘I want a ticket to nowhere.’ I thought: that’s it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

I don’t think anybody steals anything; all of us borrow.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

[On urging Nyro to tell Barbara Streisand that ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ had been personally written for her] It’s not a big lie.