I have no one style.
I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.
Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what theyre trying to say with jazz. You dont need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.
I play as I feel.
I dont do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldnt care less. If it sells one, it sells one.
Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.
We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.
It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.
If you think it, want it, dream it… then it’s real. You are what you feel.
Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.
I try to teach by example and not force ideas on a young musician. We’re here to be part of a process of exchange.
I wasn’t so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That’s why I’m broke.
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
I often wonder whether Negroes like myself who are pretty well known help out at all in breaking down barriers.
Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.
I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.
I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.
People don’t want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately and this is one of the biggest problems.
Jazz is restless. It won’t stay put and it never will.
Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back… your attention.
Jazz is a work in progress. We’ll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years.
What’s tied Jazz together is its foundation in the Blues, a reliance on group interplay and the unique phenomenon of spontaneous improvisation.
