Count Basie

All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel… and that’s what I’ve been doing all my life.

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.

Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

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

Of course there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

Vocalists must study music and know everything an instrumentalist needs to know.

The arranger doesn’t get any royalties, but I had so much fun doing it.

It’s always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don’t know where it comes from, it’s just there and I don’t question it.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

All of the technique doesn’t matter… only if the feeling is right.

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.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.

After you’ve done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.

I came from an era when we didn’t use electronic instruments. The bass wasn’t even amplified. The sound was the sound you got.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

My music had roots which I’d dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.

Play what you know and then play above that.