Ray Brown

I went up to his [Hank Jones’] house and there were four guys there: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach. Not a bad place to be. Scared shitless, but a nice place to be on my second day in New York.

Jazz is a complete lifestyle, something that you feel, something that you live.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

Unless I really loved it and felt really passionate about it, I would just kind of abort the song and start a new one.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales. I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.

Look at the tune and not make the same statement that has been made a million times.

Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together and the aesthetic, romantic transference.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

You have to understand the styles and it’s good to study those that came before us.

I have a nice car, a Mercedes. And then I have an old El Camino truck that I’m crazy about. I like to get in that truck and go up in the hills near where I live, in Vegas, and take my camera. That, to me, is Heaven, being out in nature, taking pictures of the wildlife.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you

I don’t know what they’re thinking about. Just because someone says, ‘I like what you do’ or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I’ve had that experience with record companies.

Les is an old friend of mine. He gave me this special white Les Paul – he wound the pickups himself – for my birthday, first time I met him. I play everything from heavy metal to blues to jazz on it. He just hit it right on the head when he designed the Les Paul. I like it better than most girlfriends I’ve had. The godfather of rock ‘n’ roll, I call him. Without him, none of us would have a job.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.