Jazz stands for freedom.
Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.
Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.
There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.
There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.
No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.
It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.
I don’t intend to be a performing flea anymore. I was the dreamweaver, but although I’ll be around I don’t intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don’t want to die at 40.
I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.
Nobody has ever been able to define Jazz satisfactorily. This is probably because anyone who was capable of doing so never really wanted to, knowing how much you would have to leave out of the definition.
As long as I can say what it is that I need to say, then I’ll fit whatever I’m trying to say around a melody.
I did go through a trial-and-error period where I tried out lots of different guitars, but within a couple of years I was right back to the Les Paul. From that point it’s stayed with me ever since. I have other guitars—and I love a lot of them—but I’m most at home on a Les Paul. It’s interesting: most of the time I would even rather make a Les Paul do the things those other guitars do. From the get-go, the Les Paul spoke to me.
Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.
We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.
I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.
Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.
I love it. When they stop imitating me then I’ll start wondering where I’m going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.
Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.
I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen. You can’t sit back and try to figure out what people want or leave it up to them to decide. When we all started in this business we would dictate to the audience what was great and they picked up on that based on the fact that we believed that it was great. But that’s all changed. What’s happened in the last ten years or so because is that the technology now means that everyone with a computer can make music and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.
It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop and adapt to the circumstances of its environment.
I guess you can look at me, and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.
