Don’t bullshit, just play.
Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.
Jazz music is the power of now.
I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel.
Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.
Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.
Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.
When you hear my lyrics, you hear the shots that I throw at people. I throw shots because I always been the underdog. I got rejected so many times, and I say it in my lyrics constantly.
Music is like wine, the less you know about it the sweeter you like it.
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.
There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.
Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don’t have to worry about anything.
When I sing, trouble can sit right on my shoulder and I don’t even notice.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.
I was a singing disc jockey who heard every type of music there was – and loved it all.
Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.
I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.
Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.
I think when my brother (Claude who founded vocal sextet Take Six) got his deal and I saw him on the Grammys that was when I said, ‘oh, you know what? If he can do it then maybe I can do too’ and that’s when I really focused on trying to make it in this business.
I remember Glenn Miller coming to me once, before he had his own band, saying, How do you do it? How do you get started? It’s so difficult. I told him, I don’t know but whatever you do don’t stop. Just keep on going.
Mary Lou Williams used to tell me: If you’re not feeling right, play a minor tune and it falls into place.
Music is the shorthand of emotion
