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.
I was probably six years old when I first sang before an audience.
Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.
You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.
There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.
Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.
Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.
Miles Davis was a part of my life from 1947 on. I was born in 1941 and I first heard him in 1947 on a 78 rpm. And then I followed his career, starting with his first solo album in 1951. He was an icon and inspiration and a mentor to me.
I’m not a star. I’m just backing up the cats.
It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.
Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.
Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.
I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.
If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.
By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.
A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don’t do that on stage.
