Lionel Hampton

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I’ll give it to them.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m no good with chords. I’m horrible with chords.

The weird thing about bass is the simplest stuff to do is the hardest.

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

We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.

The blues tells a story in itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing.

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.

I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.

The qualities in music I consider most important are beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity.

I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not, it’s feeling.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.