Jimmy McGriff

Music is interior decoration.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music.

I remember going to sleep many nights with a Gibson catalog, dreaming about getting a Les Paul. I finally did, with a loan from my Dad. It’s a really heavy instrument. But it plays like butter. I met Les backstage at a show once. Jeff Beck made me play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ for Les, which was a little embarrassing. He changed history, big-time.

Les is an old friend of mine. He gave me this special white Les Paul – he wound the pickups himself – for my birthday, first time I met him. I play everything from heavy metal to blues to jazz on it. He just hit it right on the head when he designed the Les Paul. I like it better than most girlfriends I’ve had. The godfather of rock ‘n’ roll, I call him. Without him, none of us would have a job.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.

Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at Jazz.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

I’ve been a jazz artist playing pop and R&B my entire career.