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

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

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

Music is your experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

I look for a deep, gutty feelin’ in a guitar tone. I don’t use picks. People ask, “How you get that?” It’s just there. There’s a lot of people try to play real fast chords-da da da da da-that ain’t the hard, solid blues. It’s synthetic. It has not feeling to it. You sit down and play some funky, funky guitar. Take your time! Don’t rush it. Just let it come flowing through you. I can play guitar so funky, it’ll bring teardrops to your eyes.

Know the business; you need to know the business side of things.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

The audience, they’re not professionals. They just love music. It isn’t necessary to play over their heads to be admired.

Actually, I think the more Ben [Taylor] sings, the less like James he sounds.

Jazz music is collective creativity.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

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.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.

Nothing is out of the question for me. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light…Then I’m grateful.

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. Some of it comes from books.