Count Basie

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

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.

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.

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

If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

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.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

I am inclined to just write music and not worry about what people can or can’t do.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not, it’s feeling.

If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

Once we’re inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

When Jazz broke through in England, I remember sneaking to listen on the radio much to my parent’s disapproval.