Les Paul

This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.

If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.

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.

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

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.

To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

I don’t really look at my career in terms of highlights and low lights. I think I’m at this place right now and to be at this place right now I’ve had to go through many obstacles and lots of highs and lows and for me it’s about the entire journey.

Some twenty years ago, during the course of a memorable evening at the Stravinskys’ home in Los Angeles, the venerable maestro turned to me and said in no uncertain terms: ‘My dear, you should conduct your own music. All composers should conduct their own music!

I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.

Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.