To work is to feel alive.
I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.
If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.
One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.
Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.
You can’t go to the store and buy a good ear and rhythm.
The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.
When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.
If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.
Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.
Django Reinhardt was fantastic. he must have been playing all the time to be that good.
I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it’s about feeling more than being perfect.
Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.
If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.
I’m too busy playing. When I’m playing I don’t pay attention to who’s listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don’t listen to one instrument; you listen to music.
We made records to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records. I still feel that way. I put out a record because I think it’s beautiful, not necessarily commercial.
Music should never be harmless.
Just allow your feelings to go with the music and you’ll find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.
Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.
You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, ‘Yes, where are you going?’ And he says, ‘I want a ticket to nowhere.’ I thought: that’s it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.
