It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.
Musically, I love to talk just off the top of my head and that’s what Jazz is all about.
Jazz is like wine. When it is new it’s only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.
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.
Players are coming from other backgrounds: rock, folk, ethnic music. It’s changing Jazz for the better.
If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.
When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after were dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.
The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.
All that I’ve played, all that I’ve sung, I couldn’t have done any other way.
To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.
Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.
I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.
Jazz music is a special skill that has brought pleasure to millions throughout the world.
However it goes, I’ll just keep playing. That’s where the basic satisfaction is at.
I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.
The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.
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?
Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.
I’d rather be B.B. King. That’s the way I started. Let the heavy metal guys play heavy metal, let the others play the other… I try to do what I do better, not get away from it.
I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.
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.
