I play as I feel.
We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.
I don’t believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.
Its the group sound thats important, even when youre playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. Thats jazz.
I have no one style.
Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.
He’s not a performer, he’s not a composer, he’s not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.
A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.
People involve themselves with the superficiality of Jazz without digging for its soul.
I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.
Music is a verb.
Those who wish to sing, always find a song.
Gershwin was right in his time, at his time. Everybody else was behind.
Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.
[on Prince] I learned about music that didn’t have any barriers or any kind of, like, containment. I learned about wild, crazy topics and ways to express yourself that had never been written in quite that way before. I learned that a human being could be able to defy all stereotypes, and be the epitome of badassness.
The Blues and Jazz will live forever. So will the Delta and the Big Easy.
[on B. B. King] Very seldom does he talks about the way he play, man. He always wanna talk about young women. And I fuss at him sometimes, I say, Man I wanna know what did you do here!’
When I achieved what I thought the musicians were trying to do, the sound sort of bloomed. When it’s right, everything is beautiful.
Words are the children of reason and therefore can’t translate the feeling of Jazz because they’re not part of it.
It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.
If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.
