Homer Simpson

I never apologize. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I am.

Live music is best! Make plans to get out and support your local Jazz scene.

I’m creating music – it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it.

Jazz without the Blues is like BBQ without the sauce.

I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

It was a great thrill to listen every night and hear him on NBC radio. Les played just as great then. And then later on, in the 1950s, Les Paul turned the whole world on to guitar. He’s just a terrific, flashy, tasty guitarist.

Give it a good go, try to have fun at it, try to pass on some good notes and some good sounds to your fans, and I don’t think you will have wasted your time.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self- consciousness.

I haven’t got a great jazz band and I don’t want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat’s among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It’s all in what you define as ‘real jazz.’ It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

I like people who have worked long and hard, developing through introspection and dedication.

There’s a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

You’re just a little too hip for the room. It’s not good to be too hip because two hips make an ass.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.