Billy Eckstine

You can’t sing about love unless you know about it.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education… just talent.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

In order to be honest with myself, I have to reveal more of who I am. This is a part of the improv process.

When the label came to me to say, ‘would you like to do another record,’ I said, ‘Well I got these sixteen songs sitting here, so let’s do it.’ And that was pretty much it… I never stopped writing, it’s just the way that the business is now; you just try to find a different model.

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.

I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

I think music needs to be of its time and speak to that time.

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about Jazz and Blues.