Jay McShann

You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

Whenever there’s a change with Jazz and its aesthetics, it’s almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

Talent is only the starting point.

I’ve always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.

Jazz can only enhance the Classical side and Classical can only enhance the Jazz side.

Even now, at 82 years old, if I don’t learn something every day, you know what I think? It’s a day lost. Now, I don’t practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I’m doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.

Look for the one who’s not smiling and play to that person. Once you’ve got that person, you’ve got the whole club.

I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

I went back and listened to the first three albums I made and tried to figure out what was special about them, why people keep going back to them. I think it was because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea if they were going to play it on the radio or anything. All I did was write songs, so that’s what I got back to.

Just to keep it interesting I’ll tune the guitar randomly, so I don’t know what’s going to come out.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often -in fact, mostly -at the expense of everything else in my life.