Lionel Hampton

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

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

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.

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

Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

Vocalists must study music and know everything an instrumentalist needs to know.

I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?

When you listen to someone improvise, the notes that are played are only half the story.

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

Audiences are smart. They are not going to come out to see you unless you are honest.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.

I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.