Kenny Dorham

Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I ‘d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

I kind of hate the fact that people are always trying to put you into a category. I hate walls, and I hate boundaries. I don’t like that. I listen to everything.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom and passion.

I am the sum total of everything that I have experienced musically.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Silence is what makes music sexy. I just move blocks of silence around. The notes are an afterthought.

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.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say anything sarcastic.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

If I don’t learn something new every day, it’s a day lost

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.