Jimmy Smith

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.

Three months. I was playing the organ for three months. It was a challenge for me in the beginning.

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.

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

And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.

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

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

Good Jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms and yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of Jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.

The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.

Music is interior decoration.

If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.

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

It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop and adapt to the circumstances of its environment.

I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.

I love to hear the note sing.

As a young cellist I had played to an audience that had included Pablo Casals and reacted with poor, nervous playing. Casals sought me out after the concert and praised me highly, somewhat easing the pain and thinking him a very kind man.

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 got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

I’m just trying to create context for me to improve my musicianship.