Don’t bullshit, just play.
Jazz music is the power of now.
Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.
I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel.
Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.
In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.
If you’re gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.
No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.
A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.
Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.
People will hire you and then tell you not to do what you were doing when they heard you.
Keeping your artistic self as creative as possible is a balancing act.
The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.
Musicians need enough experience to develop a vocabulary.
I look for a deep, gutty feelin’ in a guitar tone. I don’t use picks. People ask, How you get that? It’s just there. There’s a lot of people try to play real fast chords-da da da da da-that ain’t the hard, solid blues. It’s synthetic. It has not feeling to it. You sit down and play some funky, funky guitar. Take your time! Don’t rush it. Just let it come flowing through you. I can play guitar so funky, it’ll bring teardrops to your eyes.
There’s always room for improvisation or changes of expression.
I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.
The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.
Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what theyre trying to say with jazz. You dont need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.
Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.
To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.
