Gerry Mulligan

I’ve always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

I’m fascinated with the electronic devices that we can mess around with.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

I’m not thinking about what needs to be on the radio. I’m not thinking about anything other than – I’m just going to let this music come out of me and not have any sort of preconceived notion of what I should do. I’m just going to do it.

He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

There are a million good tunes.

You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.

The guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It’s everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It’s everything, but it’s elusive.

I felt like I was making a record under the radar, and that is my favorite way to do anything.

Of the whole bunch of guys who play hollow body guitar, I think Herb Ellis has the most drive.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.

Dizzy used to tell me I’m playing too hard. He’d say to not give everything. Miles told me that too.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

I think music needs to be of its time and speak to that time.

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

My improvisations are a beguiling mixture of the vertical and the horizontal.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.