You blows who you is.
Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.
There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.
Never play anything the same way twice.
Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.
I never have any trouble playing anything I can think of. The trouble is thinking of what to play.
I loved Billie Holiday more than any other person other than myself on the stage.
If you can’t get your songs to people one way, you have to find another.
Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.
The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.
The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.
You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.
If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.
Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.
I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!
Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.
The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.
I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.
Im believe that all people are in possession of what might be called a universal musical mind.
Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.
