Nat King Cole

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

If I could read it, I could play it.

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

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.

I wanna hear myself everywhere

I was really running a music school back then, because my band wasn’t making any money. I keep talking about money, because most people don’t understand the part of money in running a band.

New artists can own their content and completely build their base and their following without having to sell or be owned by anybody and it creates such a diversity.

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

That’s the beauty of music. They can’t take it from you.

Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven’t yet done.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good – he’s rock’s #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

People love us when we play what we want to play but we’re starving.