Bobby Hutcherson

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

If a Jazz musician plays someone else’s song, he has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.

Music isn’t just learning notes and playing them. You learn notes to play the music of your soul.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

Only play what you hear. If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

This be an empty world without the blues.

Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor.

I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can’t define it beyond that.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Through Dizzy and Bird I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.