Lionel Hampton

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.

Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.

New artists can own their content and completely build their base and their following without having to sell or be owned by anybody and it creates such a diversity.

Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.

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 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.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

I would like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.

I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

I’ve always liked the Freddie King/B. B. King rich tone, and at the same time, I like the manic Buddy Guy/Otis Rush Strat tone. So I’m always caught in the middle of the Gibson and Fender sounds. If I’m playing my black [Fender] Strat, and I’m in the middle of a blues, I kind of wish I was playing a [Gibson] Les Paul. Then again, if I was playing a Les Paul, the sound would be great, but I’d be saying, “Man, I wish I had the Stratocaster neck!”

I’ve studied all my musical life, but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.

I went through a lot of mental pains and anguish about choosing between jazz and classical. I realized that where I functioned was where I should be, and where I functioned was in jazz, so that was it.

[on B.B. King] He is without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced, and the most humble and genuine man you would ever wish to meet. In terms of scale or stature, I believe that if Robert Johnson was reincarnated, he is probably B.B. King.

However it goes, I’ll just keep playing. That’s where the basic satisfaction is at.