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.

I play as I feel.

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

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

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.

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 wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.

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.

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

I often wonder whether Negroes like myself who are pretty well known help out at all in breaking down barriers.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

[on Ornette Coleman] Man, that cat is nuts!

Art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

10% of musicians make 90% of the money, while the remaining 90% of musicians make the 10% that’s left.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

I’ve never thought the blues was a matter of copying other people. The blues singer should sing songs about his own life. And once the ball got rolling, I felt confident enough to do that as well as cover other people’s songs, and the tributes. You’ve got to think about representing your own life in the music, and for me that meant bringing in an element of jazz; I was brought up on jazz, it was my father’s work, it was in the house.

A good bassist determines the direction of any band.

Look at the tune and not make the same statement that has been made a million times.