Chet Baker

What a fool I am to think my breaking heart could kid the moon.

He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.

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

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.

What a guy, what a fool am I, to think my breaking heart could kid the moon.

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

You could still improvise but do it with lyrics.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.

Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.

I felt like I was making a record under the radar, and that is my favorite way to do anything.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

It’s spontaneity that has always characterized Jazz music’s finest improvisers.

I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.

People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.