I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is ’cause I’m changing all the time.
I’ve had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.
For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hr and they always tipped me at the end of the night.
You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!
If you’re going to make a mistake, make it loud so everybody else sounds wrong.
Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.
A Jazz Diet will make you hipper, thinner, taller, smarter, richer, happier and more attractive to members of both sexes.
Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.
For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn’t live with it–even of my own music–with the same nuances forever.
I love songs that are very autobiographical.
Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.
Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.
I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.
Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.
The high note is not the only thing.
When Jazz broke through in England, I remember sneaking to listen on the radio much to my parent’s disapproval.
I am only a mixture of countless influences and thanks to that I am able to find my own style of playing.
I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.
There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead
I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.
If I could read it, I could play it.
