Billy Eckstine

I’m glad I don’t have perfect pitch because it can drive you crazy.

You can’t sing about love unless you know about it.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

I’ll keep evolving and put that into my songs.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.

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

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.

I’m too busy playing. When I’m playing I don’t pay attention to who’s listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don’t listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

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

[moving to Las Vegas] It was sort of like a man getting married – you don’t have to go out looking for girls, you’ve got your girl with you. I could go to casinos any time I had money and wanted to, so I actually went less.

People don’t want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately and this is one of the biggest problems.

I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable.

I could see the blues was about survival.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

I’ve had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.