Jimmy Smith

Choosing people to be on your ‘Sammy Hagar and Friends’ record, you’re going, ‘I’ve got so many friends.’ And so many friends have called me up and said, ‘Come on dude, why didn’t you ask me to be on the record?’ I’m going, ‘Damn, I forgot.’ I really did.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

Everybody has somebody that they patterned themselves after.

Ninety-five percent of my audience was white.

I really feel like I made it a great record. I really feel good about it. In this day and age to make a record that you say, ‘This is different,’ that’s a tough nut. I did it by accident but it got done. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know how to do it.

I heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.

I like jazz, rock n’ roll, some hip hop – I can’t think of any music I don’t like.

Jazz has such great feeling and emotional content it really doesn’t require technical understanding.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.

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.

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

There’s so many ways you can hit one note.

I wasn’t interested in practicing Bach; I was too busy digging Horace Silver!

I was not prepared to play the role of singer in the camp of the warriors

Living is easy with eyes closed.

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.