Phil Woods

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

The more you play, the more you hear and the more you hear, the more you want to play.

Just allow your feelings to go with the music and you’ll find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz.

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

There’s two things you can’t live without. Water and music.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about, but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

It’s not that you want to sing, it’s that you have to sing.

Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.

Music is what I hear and something that I live by.