Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.
You’re just as beautiful as you feel.
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.
Theres such a cynicism about the phrase I laughed all the way to the bank. Its as though money is what youre doing, rather than playing music. If youre playing a money game, why not get into banking?
I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.
And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.
Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.
Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.
Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.
We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.
No one is original. Everyone is derivative.
I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.
Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.
There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.
To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.
I am attracted to Jazz music for the idea of being in the moment and communicating to people spontaneously.
What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.
Les Paul was one of the great innovators of the early electric guitar, and he made some fantastic guitar records. To me, Les Paul is very much it.
I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.
Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.
