Lewis Nash

You have to understand the styles and it’s good to study those that came before us.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

It’s up to the individual to keep up with the times.

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

Music is your experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

I didn’t know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what knocked me out. Changes… man I dug.

If you can’t play the Blues you might as well hang it up.

Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.