Wes Montgomery

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

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

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

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

Jazz music has always made powerful statements about freedom, creativity and personal identity.

I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

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

As long as musicians have passion for spontaneity and creating something that’s never been before, Jazz will flourish.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don’t you ask him? And besides, maybe we’d all like to be like Miles, and just haven’t got the guts.

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

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.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

For a long time I wasn’t listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty–it would bring back memories I didn’t want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I’m not alive ’cause I’m not making it. And if it was good, I hated it ’cause I wasn’t doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious ’cause I could’ve done it better…