Count Basie

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

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

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

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.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one’s own.

The true value of this music lies in an artist’s individual creativity and that unique process of expression which is Jazz.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

I could see the blues was about survival.

If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.

I really feel like I made it a great record. I really feel good about it. In this day and age to make a record that you say, ‘This is different,’ that’s a tough nut. I did it by accident but it got done. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know how to do it.

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about Jazz and Blues.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

You give up your own personality when you imitate somebody.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.