Roy Ayers

My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me. It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice.

They told me to play what I felt. Hey, I’m a Jazz musician, that’s what I do.

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

When you want ’em you can’t get ’em, when you’ve got ’em, you don’t want ’em.

I could see the blues was about survival.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

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

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.

Musicians tell me, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.