Peggy Lee

What are you going to do when you love music? You can’t stop.

I guess you can look at me, and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

In this trumpet I hear our icons and the sound of the future.

The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

A great song can pull me out of a slump and lighten my heart.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen. You can’t sit back and try to figure out what people want or leave it up to them to decide. When we all started in this business we would dictate to the audience what was great and they picked up on that based on the fact that we believed that it was great. But that’s all changed. What’s happened in the last ten years or so because is that the technology now means that everyone with a computer can make music and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.