Paul Kreibich

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

People who like Jazz feel the depth and soul and intelligence that the music expresses.

Jazz music is our original American culture.

Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.

Jazz music is the real deal.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

My version of Georgia became the state song of Georgia. That was a big thing for me, man. It really touched me. Here is a state that used to lynch people like me suddenly declaring my version of a song as its state song. That is touching.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still come to my concerts, still buy my CDs, I’ll keep playing until I feel like I can’t.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

It’s not what you do, but the way you’re doing it and in the end that’s all that we have.

Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life.

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.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

Musicians should never forget we’re blessed. We have a special gift that people enjoy through us.

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Talent is only the starting point.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.