We’re here to have a ball.
If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing.
You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.
[On the word Jazz] There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s only a word. What’s in a name? Nothing! Cats say, Call me Muhammed so-and-so. But what’s the difference? A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music. 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.
A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.
It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.
Music washes away the dust of every day life.
[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player
Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.
Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen and be over eighteen.
I’ve been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.
If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.
With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I’m teeming with the drive to write.
Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.
If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.
I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.
You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.
