Glenn Miller

I haven’t got a great jazz band and I don’t want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat’s among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It’s all in what you define as ‘real jazz.’ It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality.

It’s been a big week for our side. Over on the beaches of Normandy our boys have fired the opening guns of the long awaited drive to liberate the world.

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

By giving the public a rich and full melody, distinctly arranged and well played, all the time creating new tone colors and patterns, I feel we have a better chance of being successful. I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

I haven’t a great Jazz band and I don’t want one.

In the world of Art there are no wrong choices.

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.

Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.

I’ve always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

I try to practice with my life.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

Dog spelled backward is God. That’s pretty heavy.

Last time I saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

People love us when we play what we want to play but we’re starving.