I want to create music that’s therapeutic.
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.
Apparently Jazz is now considered high art and the average person has trouble understanding it.
[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player
Jazz music is the power of now.
If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.
Somebody asked me once, Do you think that swing will ever come back? And I said, Do you think the 1938 Form will ever come back?
Jazz affirms the noblest aspirations of character, individual discipline, perseverance and innovation.
My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.
Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.
He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.
You blows who you is.
Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.
I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.
People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.
