Lionel Hampton

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

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

The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

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

I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano.

We don’t talk music. We just play.

I am the sum total of everything that I have experienced musically.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

I am only a mixture of countless influences and thanks to that I am able to find my own style of playing.

[On Louis Armstrong] You can’t play nothing on modern trumpet that doesn’t come from him, not even modern shit. I can’t even remember a time when he sounded bad playing the trumpet. Never. Not even one time. He had great feeling up in his playing and he always played on the beat. I just loved the way he played and sang.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

Jazz has such great feeling and emotional content it really doesn’t require technical understanding.

Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen and be over eighteen.

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you’ve got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off.

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

I can play all I know in eight bars.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

I was a singing disc jockey who heard every type of music there was – and loved it all.

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.