Horace Silver

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.

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.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.

I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

The emotional reaction is all that matters.

I’ve noticed that the more adventurous and in that mode that I am, it seems that the more the audience really likes it.

Your horn is your passport to the world.

Of course there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

I love Jazz because it has the perfect balance of discipline and freedom.

Don’t bullshit, just play.

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I’ve heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn’t swinging.