Nicholas Payton

Silence is what makes music sexy. I just move blocks of silence around. The notes are an afterthought.

I can’t sing it straight. I have no choice but to swing it.

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

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

A musician’s responsibility is to get as much of his art across to the public as possible.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

I met up with George Shearing about a year before my mother passed away. When I was 11 years old, Mama took me to the Edgewater Inn in Seattle and I was able to sit down and play piano for George and a lot of (the set list) was songs I had heard from the album, ‘Concerto For My Love.’ Then, after Mama died, my dad and I went to actually hear him perform at the Edgewater Inn when I was 12. Oh my gosh! It just really got me into playing piano.

We’re here to have a ball.

Musicians need enough experience to develop a vocabulary.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen. You can’t sit back and try to figure out what people want or leave it up to them to decide. When we all started in this business we would dictate to the audience what was great and they picked up on that based on the fact that we believed that it was great. But that’s all changed. What’s happened in the last ten years or so because is that the technology now means that everyone with a computer can make music and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

The only thing better than singing is more singing.

I wasn’t interested in practicing Bach; I was too busy digging Horace Silver!

Jazz never ends… it just continues.

I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.