Love is sweeping the country.
One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them.
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to borrow a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.
It’s always Jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes she’s the same old broad.
If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.
Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.
Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.
Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?
We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.
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.
The more you play, the more you hear and the more you hear, the more you want to play.
Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.
To play without passion is inexcusable.
For me, there wasn’t a line between working and getting paid or simply playing for fun.
I’m… a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective.
I could see the blues was about survival.
I learned my songs from the birds of the Brazilian forest.
