Robert Browning

A minute of success pays for years of failure.

Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

To this day, I don’t like people walking on stage not looking good. You have to look good. If you feel special about yourself then you’re going to play special.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents. There must be respect for the people that have gone before.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

The only thing better than singing is more singing.

People complain about the music industry, but this is a great time to be a musician.

Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style…I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t even want to know about chords or anything – they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive…but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz…you must abstract the principles of music which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.