Mary Lou Williams

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

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn’t, I don’t really see a point to it.

Django Reinhardt was fantastic. he must have been playing all the time to be that good.

Art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.

Of course there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. Some of it comes from books.

Nobody has ever been able to define Jazz satisfactorily. This is probably because anyone who was capable of doing so never really wanted to, knowing how much you would have to leave out of the definition.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

I’m trying to get people to see that we are our brother’s keeper. Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.

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’.

Practice as if you are the worst, play as if you are the best!

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.