Oscar Peterson

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

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.

I have no one style.

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.

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they’re trying to say with jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

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

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It’s over; it’s on the record.

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

I want to keep redefining my work and trying new things. I want my music to be able to fit into any category. I want it to float wherever my heart goes. My music is heart music; giving it any other description is dangerous.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

I’m always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

People will hire you and then tell you not to do what you were doing when they heard you.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

Gershwin was right in his time, at his time. Everybody else was behind.

Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression.

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.

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!

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.