Always keep reaching.
Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.
Inspiration comes from tunes you play, other musicians and your own imagination.
There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.
Jazz is restless. It won’t stay put and it never will.
It’s important to find your own voice and do something of your own.
What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.
I never heard of a Jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so what are you going to do… play for the walls?
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
Im using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable. I feel its the only solution to that particular problem that I presented myself.
If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.
Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.
With the birth of the first artist, came the inevitable afterbirth… the first critic
I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.
If you have something in your life worth celebrating, you can put it in a blues song.
We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.
People love us when we play what we want to play but we’re starving.
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. Its not. Its feeling.
