I’m gonna live till I die.
You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.
May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.
Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.
We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.
Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.
Jazz has always been a man telling the truth about himself.
My role as a drummer is as a team player to enhance what is going on around me.
Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.
He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.
When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.
The hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: You feel this, you play this.
Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.
Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self- consciousness.
When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.
Man, you tell a story.
A musician’s responsibility is to get as much of his art across to the public as possible.
