Scott LaFaro

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

Music is a calling that you must bring your best to, whether listening, practicing or performing.

But the guitar, my lady, whether well played or badly played, well strung or badly strung, is pleasant to hear and listen to; being so easy to learn, it attracts the busiest of talented people and makes them put aside loftier occupations so that they may hold a guitar in their hands.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

Your humanity is your instrument.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.

This be an empty world without the blues.

It is this tendency to play with manic enthusiasm on every possible occasion that distinguishes the amateur Jazz musician from the professional.

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

I went through a lot of mental pains and anguish about choosing between jazz and classical. I realized that where I functioned was where I should be, and where I functioned was in jazz, so that was it.

I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public’s going to like, anyway.

T-Bone was, to me, that sound of being in heaven.

I became a singer to sing my songs. They’re so hip who else is going to sing them?