Ellen Johnson

I love Jazz because it has the perfect balance of discipline and freedom.

I’ve had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.

Your ear is the final judge to what sounds right and what sounds wrong.

I’m too busy playing. When I’m playing I don’t pay attention to who’s listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don’t listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He’s still a nice young man, only confused.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

I thought I had swell ideas and wonderful musicians but no one else did.

We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

We may not be changing the world dramatically, but we’re improving it one note at a time.

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.