Let my children have music.
Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.
I’m too busy playing. When I’m playing I don’t pay attention to who’s listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don’t listen to one instrument; you listen to music.
They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is ’cause I’m changing all the time.
Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
To get the music the way you want it, there’s a lot of work involved.
If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.
A beat is a moment in the life a groove.
A drummer has to be kind-hearted.
Thats the thing about jazz: its free flowing, it comes from your soul.
What kills me is that everybody thinks I like Jazz.
Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.
A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.
If I’m not saying it in four choruses or less, then I’m not saying it.
Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.
Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.
Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.
If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.
I may be helping to bring harmony between people through my music.
