Oscar Peterson

I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.

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

I have no one style.

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

I play as I feel.

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

How are you going to know what’s new to play if you haven’t listened to everything that’s old?

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

You could still improvise but do it with lyrics.

Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.

Ahhh – those Jazz guys are just makin’ that stuff up!

Give it a good go, try to have fun at it, try to pass on some good notes and some good sounds to your fans, and I don’t think you will have wasted your time.

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

Miles’ sessions were not typical of anybody else’s sessions. They were totally unique.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.

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

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.