Wes Montgomery

Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.

When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved.

If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.

I thought I had swell ideas and wonderful musicians but no one else did.

Jazz musicians are the only workers who will put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

The Blues is never old.

There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.

It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop and adapt to the circumstances of its environment.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

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

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.