John Mayall

I managed to pick out some pretty special people.

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about Jazz and Blues.

If you have something in your life worth celebrating, you can put it in a blues song.

I always make it a point to pick songs on which players really shine.

I keep healthy and I’m always very active and always have been so. I don’t really see any signs of aging yet. Music keeps you young.

To me, they are equally important, as they represent a certain period in my life and times. With that in mind, it really is impossible to pick favorites.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Well, for me it’s – music is the instrument of life.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public’s going to like, anyway.

Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

Let my children have music.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking… The new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I’ve also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.

You gotta mean it and you gotta treat it gentle.

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.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

It’s part of what the blues does, to write about these things. JB Lenoir was the main one in this regard – he wrote about Korea, too, in fact. Songs that reflect these current situations – in his case, racial issues for the most part: in my case, what has happened to me, and I was in Korea.

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

I’ve been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.

I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can’t define it beyond that.