I don’t believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.
I’m surprised Beyonce liked me. I met Beyonce!!
It’s important to find your own voice and do something of your own.
So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.
We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now. I don’t know which will go first; rock and roll or Christianity.
I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.
Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.
I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.
Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.
I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.
Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.
I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.
Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.
Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.
Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.
It’s about getting the sound to flow from your body and allowing that sound to get to the piano.
It’s not what they think, it’s about what’s best for the music.
I never wanted to be like other blues singers. I might like hearing them play, but I’ve never wanted to be anyone other than myself. There are a few people that I’ve wished I could play like, but when I tried, it didn’t work.
Music is the most interesting thing in the world.
