African proverb

Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

[on Django Reinhardt] This was a man who changed my musical life by giving me a whole new perspective on the guitar and, on an even more profound level, on my relationship with sound…During my formative years, as I listened to Django’s records, especially songs like ‘Nuages’ that I would play for the rest of my life, I studied his technique. Even more, I studied his gentleness. I love the human sound he gave his acoustic guitar.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

When Bird came on the scene, it was shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark and then there was light.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can’t define it beyond that.

Have you ever wondered why young people take to music like fish to water? Maybe it’s because music is fun, plain and simple.

After the music is over it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.

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.

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable. I feel its the only solution to that particular problem that I presented myself.

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.

Using drugs didn’t help me play, all it did was hang me up for 15 years.