Jazz? has no boundaries.
I think there’s a great beauty to having problems. That’s one of the ways we learn.
It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.
I think I was supposed to play Jazz.
The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.
Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference.
But I have to be careful not to let the world dazzle me so much that I forget that I’m a husband and a father.
I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.
As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings. They seem to bring out the feelings of the artist and they brought out my feelings as a kid. They made me wanna move, or sing, or pick up Reverend’s guitar and figure out how to make those wonderful sounds.
When rock music came in, I wasn’t bitter about it. I was puzzled.
The fabulous places I’ve been, wonderful things that’ve happened, great people I’ve met ought to make a story.
In this era it’s harder for musicians to get together, … Back in the ’80s, we were all at the clubs, you ran into people all the time. Now, everybody’s kind of in their own room with their computers. I use making an album as an opportunity to connect with musicians.
What’s tied Jazz together is its foundation in the Blues, a reliance on group interplay and the unique phenomenon of spontaneous improvisation.
If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!
End phrases where you feel they should end. Don’t look for resolutions you don’t feel because the books call for them.
You have a mentor or teacher and you learn all he can show you.
Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.
People will always need love, romance, a tender touch and really personal and deeply felt music.
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.
To get the music the way you want it, there’s a lot of work involved.
I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
