John Philip Sousa

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.

The boppers flat their fifths. We consume ours.

A lot of singers think all they have to do is exercise their tonsils to get ahead. They refuse to look for new ideas and new outlets, so they fall by the wayside… I’m going to try to find out the new ideas before the others do.

You give up your own personality when you imitate somebody.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

The main thing is you want to emote.

It’s not uncomfortable for me to be a sideman, but I feel more comfortable as a bandleader.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

Sounds of daily life are musical. I try to absorb the intricacies of sounds as if I were listening to music.

I can play all I know in eight bars.

I have always seen Jazz as innovative.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

Jazz is a feeling more than anything else.