Jay McShann

I can’t understand these guys who just have to have your autograph. I asked one of them ‘What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?’

The way I look at it, they’re all part of my musical diary, and I can listen to any one of them and it will bring up memories of what was going on at that time.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

Talent is cheap, and many talents treat themselves cheaply.

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

A Les Paul, which is kind of a sissy guitar compared to a Strat anyway. The Les Paul is heavier, but because of that bulk you can do bends on it more easily. Also, the Les Paul’s lack of a vibrato arm means you’re not wrestling against the spring-loaded bridge all the time. The Strat is the ultimate because it’s like having a miniature pedal steel within it. Once you get familiar with it where the bends are and where they meld down into a fourth or whatever, you can do all kinds of pedal-steel-like things, which I think are cool..

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

I’m believe that all people are in possession of what might be called a ‘universal musical mind.’

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.