We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.
Never play anything the same way twice.
You blows who you is.
There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad. I play the good kind.
If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.
Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.
Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.
Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.
Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.
Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.
Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?
You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.
Making money aint nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die youre just as graveyard dead as he is.
There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.
What we play is life.
I don’t need words. It’s all in the phrasing.
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.
There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.
