Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith

Jazz can only enhance the Classical side and Classical can only enhance the Jazz side.

In a way, I started out to be a baritone player.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

Play the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you play.

If you think it, want it, dream it… then it’s real. You are what you feel.

The Blues? It’s the mother of American music. That’s what is is – the source.

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

I am very aware that so little has happened to the electric guitar from the time that it was conceived to now; where there are so little changes made where there should be drastic changes made. If we were to put our heads together and start thinking about modern technology we would be much more advantaged with the electric guitar than we are. I think that we’ve been stagnant for many years.

A drummer has to be kind-hearted.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

The true musician is to bring light into people’s hearts.

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.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.