Wallace Roney

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.

People who like Jazz feel the depth and soul and intelligence that the music expresses.

We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now. I don’t know which will go first; rock and roll or Christianity.

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

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

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.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

Love is sweeping the country.

I guess you can look at me, and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.

Jazz music is the real deal.

I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.