Toots Thielemans

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

When Hank Jones had his night off, I would get somebody to take my place as intermission pianist and I’d play the show with Ella, so I would get a chance to play with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as well.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

In this trumpet I hear our icons and the sound of the future.

Let the music speak for itself.

I thought of nothing else but rock ‘n’ roll; apart from sex and food and money–but that’s all the same thing, really.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

I went back and listened to the first three albums I made and tried to figure out what was special about them, why people keep going back to them. I think it was because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea if they were going to play it on the radio or anything. All I did was write songs, so that’s what I got back to.

That’s a great thing about jazz. We leave it a little space so that we have the opportunity to go where the moment takes us

Just to keep it interesting I’ll tune the guitar randomly, so I don’t know what’s going to come out.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.