Lionel Hampton

Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.

Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

I’m gonna live till I die.

A Jazz musician is supposed to find his voice, find his niche and do his thing.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

Our music is generally the music I would play way back when I was in the record business. So I’ll play World Waiting For The Sunrise and How High The Moon, maybe Over The Rainbow, some standards. But it depends upon the artist that comes up – if people like a certain kind of music, I will focus the show that way. Whoever walks up on to the stage is the star – he is the picture, we are the frame. The frame is there to make the star look better – let’s make this fellow the best he’s ever going to be.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

I’m creating music – it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it.

Without jazz, life would be a mistake.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

[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.