Jazz stands for freedom.
I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.
It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.
No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.
My dream was to have a steady job, was not to be on the road, to exist like a guy that goes to work as a mechanic or a carpenter and knows he’s gonna have a job.
There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.
There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.
Jazz can only enhance the Classical side and Classical can only enhance the Jazz side.
I learn something new every day.
I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?
Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.
Good music is good music and everything else can go to hell.
Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.
I don’t really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I’d like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.
I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.
We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.
Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.
The audience, they’re not professionals. They just love music. It isn’t necessary to play over their heads to be admired.
My chops were not as fast… [but] I just learned more on what was in my mind than what was in my chops. I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it’s the right one, and it will probably whip the guy with twenty notes.
The hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: You feel this, you play this.
Of course there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.
