Louis Armstrong

There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad. I play the good kind.

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

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.

You blows who you is.

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

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

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

The reward for playing Jazz is playing Jazz.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

I learned my songs from the birds of the Brazilian forest.

Music activates the brain at a high level.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.

I think of guitar players in terms of doctors: you have the doctor for your heart, the cardiologist, then one that works on your feet, your leg. But I believe George Benson is the one that plays all over. To me, he would be the M.D. of them all.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?