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.
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.
One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.
She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.
Music doesn’t have to hop to be hip, as long as it swings it sings.
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.
Jazz can only enhance the Classical side and Classical can only enhance the Jazz side.
Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.
If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.
You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.
A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don’t do that on stage.
The truth is I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.
It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.
Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression.
I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.
Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be Jazz.
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
There’s so many ways you can hit one note.
