Irving Berlin

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.

You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

I’m on some singer’s record date for a demo and I get a note to call Miles Davis. Of course, I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to take a chance by not calling, and it was Miles. He said, ‘I’ve got a session in an hour over at Columbia, can you make it’

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

An orchestra can become as familiar and reliable an instrument as a well-known, well-worn piano.

Somebody asked me once, ‘Do you think that swing will ever come back?’ And I said, ‘Do you think the 1938 Form will ever come back?’

You can cage the singer but not the song.

Learn the tunes by playing the masters, learn expression by playing yourself.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

If you dig it, do it. If you dig it a lot, do it again.

If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I’ve also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.

I play whatever the hell comes out… that’s it.

If you can’t play the blues, you might as well hang it up.

Music should never be harmless.

I listen to everything, I listen to all artists that come along.

What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.