Les Paul

It’s not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

It’s not technique — it’s what you have to say.

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.

Last time I saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

I gave up the guitar in 1965. Didn’t want to see a guitar. I’d go out and get drunk. When I came out of the heart surgery, the doc said, “Promise me you’ll work hard.” I said, “I thought working hard is what got me here.” He said, “No, working is what will keep you alive.”

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

A good bassist determines the direction of any band.

I came from an era when we didn’t use electronic instruments. The bass wasn’t even amplified. The sound was the sound you got.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

I would’ve loved to have been in a band, but sadly I just wasn’t good enough.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

You’re just as beautiful as you feel.

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

The way I look at it, they’re all part of my musical diary, and I can listen to any one of them and it will bring up memories of what was going on at that time.

The more you play, the more you hear and the more you hear, the more you want to play.

Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.

Judy Garland was the singer I most wanted to sound like then, not to copy, but to get some of her soul and purity. A wonderful young voice.