Nat King Cole

If I could read it, I could play it.

I may be helping to bring harmony between people through my music.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

I often wonder whether Negroes like myself who are pretty well known help out at all in breaking down barriers.

I’m a musician at heart, I know I’m not really a singer. I couldn’t compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.

I’m not playing for other musicians. We’re trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We’ll keep him happy.

To work is to feel alive.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

Jazz is like wine. When it is new it’s only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.

Whenever there’s a change with Jazz and its aesthetics, it’s almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

So until we see you again, bright moments and keep searchin’ for your mystery note on the universal piano of life.

Music is the great arbiter of the world, the key to central harmony and a necessary requirement of human emotion.

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

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

In my world, the first thing I reach for is the sound.

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I’ve heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn’t swinging.

The fact that an artist is experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in it together.

The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.