Hank Jones

When you listen to a pianist, each notes should have an identity, each note should have a soul of its own.

You blows who you is.

Sounds of daily life are musical. I try to absorb the intricacies of sounds as if I were listening to music.

Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me.

A musician’s responsibility is to get as much of his art across to the public as possible.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

I was always exposed to music. Mom and dad would have the radio on constantly.

The Blues is never old.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

I say this because it’s a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to. You hear musicians playing with great fluidity and complete conception early on, and you don’t have that ability. I didn’t. I had to know what I was doing. And ultimately it turned out that these people weren’t able to carry their thing very far. I found myself being more attracted to artists who have developed through the years and become better and deeper musicians.I believe in things that are developed through hard work.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public’s going to like, anyway.

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.