Sidney Bechet

If you’re gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I ‘d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.

T-Bone was, to me, that sound of being in heaven.

Music opens up minds to dream great dreams about where you can go and what you can do.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.

When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, ‘That’s just that ole blues singer.’

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it’s going to be difficult to get them across unless you have 1-a distinctive sound or 2- a loud sound. These are musts.

When the label came to me to say, ‘would you like to do another record,’ I said, ‘Well I got these sixteen songs sitting here, so let’s do it.’ And that was pretty much it… I never stopped writing, it’s just the way that the business is now; you just try to find a different model.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

I am at my core a singer/songwriter a la James Taylor or a la Billy Joel. It’s not that I don’t want to work with people, but I do just love doing my own thing.