Joe Williams

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

It’s not that you want to sing, it’s that you have to sing.

Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together and the aesthetic, romantic transference.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

Jazz music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you absorb it.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

Composing makes me feel like I’ve finally gotten all the way up the ladder as a musician.

I was always exposed to music. Mom and dad would have the radio on constantly.

When Bird came on the scene, it was shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark and then there was light.

We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.

The fabulous places I’ve been, wonderful things that’ve happened, great people I’ve met ought to make a story.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.

Of course there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free

I think of guitar players in terms of doctors: you have the doctor for your heart, the cardiologist, then one that works on your feet, your leg. But I believe George Benson is the one that plays all over. To me, he would be the M.D. of them all.

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever.