The Blues is never old.
You have to understand the styles and it’s good to study those that came before us.
Miles Davis and John Coltrane were so cool, if alive today global warming wouldn’t be an issue.
If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.
It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
Somebody asked me once, Do you think that swing will ever come back? And I said, Do you think the 1938 Form will ever come back?
Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.
You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.
I regard singing pretty much like acting. Each song is like playing a different role. I get very involved with my material. I feel a responsibility for the emotion it brings out in the listener.
Its part of what the blues does, to write about these things. JB Lenoir was the main one in this regard he wrote about Korea, too, in fact. Songs that reflect these current situations in his case, racial issues for the most part: in my case, what has happened to me, and I was in Korea.
I think when my brother (Claude who founded vocal sextet Take Six) got his deal and I saw him on the Grammys that was when I said, ‘oh, you know what? If he can do it then maybe I can do too’ and that’s when I really focused on trying to make it in this business.
Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.
You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.
However it goes, I’ll just keep playing. That’s where the basic satisfaction is at.
Words are the children of reason and therefore can’t translate the feeling of Jazz because they’re not part of it.
You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, you’re working without any real feeling.
