Mary Lou Williams

For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hr and they always tipped me at the end of the night.

I heard someone say ‘What’s that kid doing here? Call your piano player and let’s get started.’

Jazz stands for freedom.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues,’ they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

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

If you dig it, do it. If you dig it a lot, do it again.

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.’

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’.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.

If you play a tune and a person don’t tap their feet, don’t play the tune.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

Jazz and love are the hardest things to describe from rationale.