Hank Jones

I am the sum total of everything that I have experienced musically.

I like people who have worked long and hard, developing through introspection and dedication.

If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. Some of it comes from books.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

Master your instrument, master the music and then forget all that and just play.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

If a Jazz musician plays someone else’s song, he has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.

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.

You blows who you is.

I never believed in a set routine. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.