Joe Sample

Music activates the brain at a high level.

He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.

When there was vinyl, I just loved opening a record and smelling that wonderful smell.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

[On urging Nyro to tell Barbara Streisand that ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ had been personally written for her] It’s not a big lie.

The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.

The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Know the business; you need to know the business side of things.

For me, the Les Paul is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar of all time. If you’re not playing a Gibson guitar and you’re playing this kind of music, whether it’s punk, metal or anything grounded in rock ‘n’ roll, you’re not really doing it right. I don’t think professionally I’d every play anything else. Gibson, thank you for making greatest guitars ever.

Words are the children of reason and therefore can’t translate the feeling of Jazz because they’re not part of it.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.