Herbie Mann

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

If you keep your head in the sand, you don’t know where the kick’s coming from.

I guess you can look at me, and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.

I have younger friends who don’t work and they aren’t doing so well. My secret is to keep going, keep working.

Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life.

I don’t believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together and the aesthetic, romantic transference.

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.