Count Basie

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

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.

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

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

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

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

Music is an addiction.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

Jazz stands for freedom.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you’ve got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.

Jazz music grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath.

I’ll always write music. Whether I release a record, whether I let the public hear it or not, I’m always writing music.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz.

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Don’t give up trying to do what you really want. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.