Oscar Peterson

I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

I play as I feel.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

Jazz music has always been a place where anything is possible.

If there is no dance, there is not music.

If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

You just sort of have to play the way you are.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write to ultimately be at peace with himself.

In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

I’m meant to be an artist who can stand on my own. That’s my place; that’s what I’m supposed to do.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.