Jazz is rhythm and meaning.
There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
If I’m not saying it in four choruses or less, then I’m not saying it.
Keep on listening and tapping your feet.
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.
Jazz is like wine. When it is new it’s only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.
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.
If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!
Jazz music is the real deal.
Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.
I’ve studied all my musical life, but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it.
What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.
Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.
Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.
Jazz is not gonna be a dinosaur and stay around in one form.
A Les Paul, which is kind of a sissy guitar compared to a Strat anyway. The Les Paul is heavier, but because of that bulk you can do bends on it more easily. Also, the Les Paul’s lack of a vibrato arm means you’re not wrestling against the spring-loaded bridge all the time. The Strat is the ultimate because it’s like having a miniature pedal steel within it. Once you get familiar with it where the bends are and where they meld down into a fourth or whatever, you can do all kinds of pedal-steel-like things, which I think are cool..
