Les Paul

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.

I am very aware that so little has happened to the electric guitar from the time that it was conceived to now; where there are so little changes made where there should be drastic changes made. If we were to put our heads together and start thinking about modern technology we would be much more advantaged with the electric guitar than we are. I think that we’ve been stagnant for many years.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

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.

When you just get mixed up and there’s too much going on, then it’s time to pick up your guitar.

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

I saw a vibraphone for the first time and knew immediately I had found my means of expression.

I don’t intend to be a performing flea anymore. I was the dreamweaver, but although I’ll be around I don’t intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don’t want to die at 40.

I’m trying to make music a sensual expression, not and academic experiment.

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.

[on Prince] I learned about music that didn’t have any barriers or any kind of, like, containment. I learned about wild, crazy topics and ways to express yourself that had never been written in quite that way before. I learned that a human being could be able to defy all stereotypes, and be the epitome of badassness.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

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

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

Something just grabs you about a song.

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.

I haven’t got a great jazz band and I don’t want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat’s among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It’s all in what you define as ‘real jazz.’ It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.