Count Basie

Count don’t do nothin’. But it sure sounds good.

If you play a tune and a person don’t tap their feet, don’t play the tune.

If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, ‘Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

Your humanity is your instrument.

Jazz without the Blues is like BBQ without the sauce.

I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.

Never play anything the same way twice.

Jazz to me is a living music. It’s a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

Look for the one who’s not smiling and play to that person. Once you’ve got that person, you’ve got the whole club.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

I love Jazz because it has the perfect balance of discipline and freedom.

Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.

Music is what feelings sound like.

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.

Jazz and love are the hardest things to describe from rationale.

People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.