Artie Shaw

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

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?

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.

An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

I was really running a music school back then, because my band wasn’t making any money. I keep talking about money, because most people don’t understand the part of money in running a band.

[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.

When you’re creating your own shit, even the sky ain’t the limit.

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

Everything I’ve ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

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.

Jazz never ends… it just continues.

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn’t have a choice.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

A Jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player and a special award in 1961 for quietness.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

The hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: You feel this, you play this.