Mary Lou Williams

For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hr and they always tipped me at the end of the night.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking… The new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

It was in tune when I bought it.

I’ve worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid there weren’t.

Let your life be your music and let your music be your life.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

If you have something in your life worth celebrating, you can put it in a blues song.

I listen to everything, I listen to all artists that come along.

Music is a reservoir… of sounds.

Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together and the aesthetic, romantic transference.

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

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

So until we see you again, bright moments and keep searchin’ for your mystery note on the universal piano of life.