The time is now.
I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.
You’ve got to learn your instrument.
I am a devout musician.
Once I could play what I heard inside me, that’s when I was born.
Music is your experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.
All music is beautiful.
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.
All we are saying is give peace a chance.
If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.
To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.
Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
You’ve got to be willing to put stuff on the line, otherwise it doesn’t have much meaning.
It’s about getting the sound to flow from your body and allowing that sound to get to the piano.
You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.
For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn’t live with it–even of my own music–with the same nuances forever.
I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.
There’s always this sound out there that’s just a little beyond my reach and that just sort of keeps me going.
Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made Three O’ Clock Blues’, they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.
Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.
