John Mayall

I get most of my news from the Jon Stewart Daily Show. It’s the most level commentary you can find. You have to laugh, because it’s all so true. It’s the closest thing to a counterculture.

I managed to pick out some pretty special people.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.

I write songs about real things… The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

I do the best I can with any instrument I get attracted to. But they’re just tools in order for you to express yourself and that’s really the upshot of it.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

When I got started in New York, if you were different from Miles and Dizzy it was very difficult.

I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

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.

To rise above the crowd, discipline yourself unceasingly to the strict demand and realities of your ambition.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

I feel like….Music is the – it’s the answer. It’s the reason.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

There are a million good tunes.

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

Music is a calling that you must bring your best to, whether listening, practicing or performing.

We made records to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records. I still feel that way. I put out a record because I think it’s beautiful, not necessarily commercial.