Oscar Peterson

The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

I have no one style.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

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

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

Especially, I want my work-and the trios if possible-to sing.

I saw a vibraphone for the first time and knew immediately I had found my means of expression.

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

As soon as it was understood that we could handle things in our own way, it was the thrill of my life to walk out on that stage with people just hemming the band in.

I think Ive done the best I could have done. But I keep wanting to play better, go further. There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I havent yet done. When I was younger I thought maybe Id reached that peak. But Im 86 now, and if I make it through to next month, Ill be 87. And now I know it can never be perfect, it can never be exactly what it should be, so you got to keep going further, getting better.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that’s all it is about is opinions.

The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.

Look for the one who’s not smiling and play to that person. Once you’ve got that person, you’ve got the whole club.

I always had a deep feeling to be one with the very minute I’m in.

I wanted something very dense, something that would sustain long and more pieces of wood that would be soft, sweet, for more of a mellow sound.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

I think pop music is one of the few things in the 20th century that have made giant strides in reverse.

You can’t go to the store and buy a good ear and rhythm.