What we play is life.
Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.
If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.
Making money aint 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 youre just as graveyard dead as he is.
I don’t need words. It’s all in the phrasing.
Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.
There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.
One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music.
Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.
If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.
It was a great thrill to listen every night and hear him on NBC radio. Les played just as great then. And then later on, in the 1950s, Les Paul turned the whole world on to guitar. He’s just a terrific, flashy, tasty guitarist.
If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.
To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.
I don’t really look at my career in terms of highlights and low lights. I think I’m at this place right now and to be at this place right now I’ve had to go through many obstacles and lots of highs and lows and for me it’s about the entire journey.
Jazz to me is a living music. It’s a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.
The reward for playing Jazz is playing Jazz.
There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.
I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’
In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.
Jazz music is haunted by its own hungry ghosts.
Finally Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet. He put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying yes.
Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.
