Count Basie

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.

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.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

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!

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

A Jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.

I hear beauty and elegance combined with passion and fire.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

Just to keep it interesting I’ll tune the guitar randomly, so I don’t know what’s going to come out.

I’m a fan first. I believed Duke Ellington when he said there’s no bad music, just some of it is presented badly. As a kid, hanging around Church Street, the presentation of music was so powerful, I couldn’t help but jump for joy. I had discovered art, or truth, or whatever you want to call it; I had seen a light I’d follow forever.

Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

The sound of the orchestra is one of the most magnificent musical sounds that has ever existed.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

I am a writer – that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.