Nat King Cole

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

If I could read it, I could play 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.

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

I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

It’s not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

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.

Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.

In Kansas City joints ran 9pm-5am. Pay was a $1.25 a night but somebody special like Count Basie could command $1.50.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

Musicians tell me, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.

If you can’t play the blues, you might as well hang it up.

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it’s never going to bug you. But here’s the secret about the guitar – it’s defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

Jazz has evolved with an inner necessity characteristic of any true art form.

What I look for in concert is a connection with the audience.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.