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.
I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.
I was probably six years old when I first sang before an audience.
It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s just that when you’re playing, Stephane, you’ve got both Chaput and me backing you, but when I’m soloing I’ve only got one guitar behind me!
Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made Three O’ Clock Blues’, they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.
If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.
I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.
I’ll always write music. Whether I release a record, whether I let the public hear it or not, I’m always writing music.
Music used to be essential and meaningful, but now it’s disposable.
You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.
Your sound is you and what you really feel inside.
Jazz is all about improvisation and it’s about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you’ll never do it this way twice. I’ve studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.
The blues comes right back to a person’s feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don’t know nothing about the blues, please believe me.
First I was working on classical music that didn’t move me at all. I hated it. So I decided to discover the kinds of classical music that did move melike Chopin, Satie, Beethoven, and certain Mozart songs. Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy and it made me feel something. That’s when I realized music was inside me.
Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.
Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.
