Artie Shaw

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?

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

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

There’s such a cynicism about the phrase ‘I laughed all the way to the bank.’ It’s as though money is what you’re doing, rather than playing music. If you’re playing a money game, why not get into banking?

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.

‘Swing’ is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a ‘swing band’ in music.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

Love is sweeping the country.

The more you listen, the more your hear.

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I’ve also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.

I cringed when I heard myself described as a Jazz singer. I’ve always thought of myself as a Jazz vocalist.

We all played bad before we played good.

When there was vinyl, I just loved opening a record and smelling that wonderful smell.

Critics don’t buy records. They get ’em free.

If you’re making money people don’t think you’re playing Jazz. When you’re not making money they think you’re a great Jazz musician.

The first time I ever had to go overseas for music was to play the Royal Festival Hall in London, singing in a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, and that week was insane: Thursday I rehearse with the orchestra; Friday I sing two songs in front of 2,500 people, which I have never done before; and the next day I go to Abbey Road to record with Herbie Hancock; and then I am playing a pub in south London somewhere, and nobody cares because London have lost some sporting match; and then I go home and I’m standing in front of my washing machine, putting my unmentionables into the dryer, and in that instant, I just looked at myself and said ‘This life is going to be strange’.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

Whenever there’s a change with Jazz and its aesthetics, it’s almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!