It’s all music.
Playing bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.
By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.
I’m not playing for other musicians. We’re trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We’ll keep him happy.
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.
Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.
Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.
Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don’t have to worry about anything.
I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’
One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music.
Unless I really loved it and felt really passionate about it, I would just kind of abort the song and start a new one.
