Henry Mancini

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief.

I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness.

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

Jazz stresses less on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content.

The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.

It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.

Musicians need to continue higher learning try to expand the pallet.

I want to create music that’s therapeutic.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?