Artie Shaw

No matter how carefully and assiduously and how deeply you bury shit, the American public will find it and buy it in large quantity, It’s true, absolutely true.

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?’

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijuana, and will expire on cocaine.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways.

There’s always this sound out there that’s just a little beyond my reach and that just sort of keeps me going.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at Jazz.

I don’t want to sing anything that doesn’t come real.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

When Hank Jones had his night off, I would get somebody to take my place as intermission pianist and I’d play the show with Ella, so I would get a chance to play with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as well.

You don’t chose your inspirations, they chose you.

I got out of the car and there was a knife in my neck. The guy says, “Don’t move.” And the drummer got out of the car, and he got a gun in his head. This was my entrance to the South Side of Chicago. But it was necessary, because I wanted to play jazz.

Let the music speak for itself.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It’s over; it’s on the record.

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can’t ‘not’ be a musician.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

Jazz has such great feeling and emotional content it really doesn’t require technical understanding.

[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.