Shorty Rogers

Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

Practice 15 or 20 years and then it comes out spontaneously.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

I’m a big fan of music, a student. I just wanna learn and keep enhancing my education about Jazz.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

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.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It’s over; it’s on the record.

Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

Jazz stands for freedom.

I don’t believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.