Jimmy Smith

It’s a matter of who would be right for each song. Mickey Hart for ‘All We Need is An Island’ – he’s the only guy I know who has Tahitian drums and every kind of drum on the planet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

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.

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

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing.

The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.

It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.

Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

Music is the shorthand of emotion

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues,’ they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

Ahhh – those Jazz guys are just makin’ that stuff up!

I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.