Jazz stands for freedom.
My dream was to have a steady job, was not to be on the road, to exist like a guy that goes to work as a mechanic or a carpenter and knows he’s gonna have a job.
It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.
I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.
No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.
I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.
It’s about getting the sound to flow from your body and allowing that sound to get to the piano.
Music is the most interesting thing in the world.
I like the interplay in the music.
Jazz is about being in the moment.
I want people to walk away with the same joy, hope and love that I put into my music.
For me, I started on a Les Paul and went through years of playing other guitars and just came back full circle to what was more natural to me.
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.
I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.
Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be Jazz.
But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.
Im using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable. I feel its the only solution to that particular problem that I presented myself.
I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.
Breathe…. breathe a lot!
