Louis Armstrong

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

What we play is life.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

You blows who you is.

Joe’s been my drummer for 14 years, and we’ve been buddies for six years.

It’s spontaneity that has always characterized Jazz music’s finest improvisers.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

People who are meant to be drawn to your music will find you.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was 6 years old.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it’s like the human voice

‘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.