Music is interior decoration.
A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?
Your humanity is your instrument.
The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.
I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!
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.
Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz.
Jazz isn’t a what, it’s a how.
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. Its not. Its feeling.
A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.
Django Reinhardt was fantastic. he must have been playing all the time to be that good.
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.
I kind of hate the fact that people are always trying to put you into a category. I hate walls, and I hate boundaries. I don’t like that. I listen to everything.
This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.
All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel… and that’s what I’ve been doing all my life.
Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.
I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.
Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
I don’t worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.
I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.
