Louis Armstrong

You blows who you is.

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

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

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

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.

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

Start well and end well. The middle will look after itself.

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.

All I play is truth and emotion.

What are you going to do when you love music? You can’t stop.

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.

My fans are the best in the world! They’ve grown up with me and stayed with me through this entire journey.

It is better to be felt than to be heard.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general.

I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.