Hunter S. Thompson

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I’ll give it to them.

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.

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.

[on B.B. King] He is without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced, and the most humble and genuine man you would ever wish to meet. In terms of scale or stature, I believe that if Robert Johnson was reincarnated, he is probably B.B. King.

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Talent is only the starting point.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.