Steve Turre

The Blues is never old.

The high note is not the only thing.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it.

We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn’t know how to read music is over.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of Jazz.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

I wasn’t so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That’s why I’m broke.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

People who like Jazz feel the depth and soul and intelligence that the music expresses.

Something just grabs you about a song.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.