Chet Atkins

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.

It was a great thrill to listen every night and hear him on NBC radio. Les played just as great then. And then later on, in the 1950s, Les Paul turned the whole world on to guitar. He’s just a terrific, flashy, tasty guitarist.

Do it again on the next verse and people think you meant it.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

I try to practice with my life.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.

Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

I don’t really look at my career in terms of highlights and low lights. I think I’m at this place right now and to be at this place right now I’ve had to go through many obstacles and lots of highs and lows and for me it’s about the entire journey.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways.

It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

True Jazz lovers understand the rhythms are infectious because they are the roots.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical and spiritual need for me.