Wes Montgomery

When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved.

Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.

If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.

Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I’m concerned with retaining that process.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters and gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle-class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.

The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

Jazz to me is a living music. It’s a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

I remember going to sleep many nights with a Gibson catalog, dreaming about getting a Les Paul. I finally did, with a loan from my Dad. It’s a really heavy instrument. But it plays like butter. I met Les backstage at a show once. Jeff Beck made me play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ for Les, which was a little embarrassing. He changed history, big-time.

It’s about getting the sound to flow from your body and allowing that sound to get to the piano.

I expect the audience to come up to my level.

Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.

Love is sweeping the country.

My version of Georgia became the state song of Georgia. That was a big thing for me, man. It really touched me. Here is a state that used to lynch people like me suddenly declaring my version of a song as its state song. That is touching.