I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?
I’m always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.
Tomorrow you’ll wish you had practiced harder today.
We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about, but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.
People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.
Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. Its not. Its feeling.
When I sing, trouble can sit right on my shoulder and I don’t even notice.
Music is your experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
I thought of nothing else but rock ‘n’ roll; apart from sex and food and money–but that’s all the same thing, really.
Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.
I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.
Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.
You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
I discovered very early that it wasn’t quite enough for me to imitate people.
Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.
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.
Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.
Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.
May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.
The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.
