Norma Teagarden

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings. They seem to bring out the feelings of the artist and they brought out my feelings as a kid. They made me wanna move, or sing, or pick up Reverend’s guitar and figure out how to make those wonderful sounds.

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

Jazz music has become academic. Sometimes that doesn’t feel right to me.

I came from an era when we didn’t use electronic instruments. The bass wasn’t even amplified. The sound was the sound you got.

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.

Miles told me not to use vibrato because when you get old, you’re going to shake anyway.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.

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

Les is an old friend of mine. He gave me this special white Les Paul – he wound the pickups himself – for my birthday, first time I met him. I play everything from heavy metal to blues to jazz on it. He just hit it right on the head when he designed the Les Paul. I like it better than most girlfriends I’ve had. The godfather of rock ‘n’ roll, I call him. Without him, none of us would have a job.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.