Louis Armstrong

What we play is life.

Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

I don’t need words. It’s all in the phrasing.

It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.

If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.

When you are studying Jazz best thing to do is listen to records and live music as much you can and absorb everything.

When you listen to a pianist, each notes should have an identity, each note should have a soul of its own.

I’ve noticed that the more adventurous and in that mode that I am, it seems that the more the audience really likes it.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

I’m a big fan of music, a student. I just wanna learn and keep enhancing my education about Jazz.

I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

Whenever there’s a change with Jazz and its aesthetics, it’s almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of their instrument.

If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

‘Swing’ is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a ‘swing band’ in music.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often -in fact, mostly -at the expense of everything else in my life.

When you want ’em you can’t get ’em, when you’ve got ’em, you don’t want ’em.

Blow your life through your horn.