Jazz is rhythm and meaning.
There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
Music allows the great opportunity to play with people you love.
I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. ‘Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles.
I’ve had a lot of things to be proud of in my life, but none more than the Jazz festival.
Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.
Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about Jazz and Blues.
What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.
We’re here to have a ball.
When I heard T-Bone, I flat out lost my mind.
You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.
I am a writer – that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.
I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.
I hear beauty and elegance combined with passion and fire.
Jimmy (Wakely) told me, I don’t want you to sound so much like Dinah Washington.’ So, I thought, How can I get around this?’ And one of the people I really dug was Patti Page. So I thought, Oh, I’m going to sound like her.’ I actually did with a couple curly-cues thrown in for effect, but, that’s how I started getting away from the predominant Dinah influence, and getting my own style together.
The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.
Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.
