Jessica Williams

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

I’ve always liked the Freddie King/B. B. King rich tone, and at the same time, I like the manic Buddy Guy/Otis Rush Strat tone. So I’m always caught in the middle of the Gibson and Fender sounds. If I’m playing my black [Fender] Strat, and I’m in the middle of a blues, I kind of wish I was playing a [Gibson] Les Paul. Then again, if I was playing a Les Paul, the sound would be great, but I’d be saying, “Man, I wish I had the Stratocaster neck!”

Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen and be over eighteen.

A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.

Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing very powerful emotions. That’s what draws people towards it.