We’re here to have a ball.
Music washes away the dust of every day life.
Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.
People will hire you and then tell you not to do what you were doing when they heard you.
If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.
When it comes to music, don’t lie to yourself; just tell yourself the truth.
It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.
The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.
Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.
I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever.
For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.
I never set out to find a style of my own, it just happened.
For me, I started on a Les Paul and went through years of playing other guitars and just came back full circle to what was more natural to me.
My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
Those who wish to sing, always find a song.
Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.
My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.
If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters and gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle-class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.
Three months. I was playing the organ for three months. It was a challenge for me in the beginning.
Musicians need enough experience to develop a vocabulary.
