Don’t bullshit, just play.
I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel.
Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.
A beat is a moment in the life a groove.
Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.
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.
I became a singer to sing my songs. They’re so hip who else is going to sing them?
External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.
When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.
I want to keep redefining my work and trying new things. I want my music to be able to fit into any category. I want it to float wherever my heart goes. My music is heart music; giving it any other description is dangerous.
People love us when we play what we want to play but we’re starving.
Live music is best! Make plans to get out and support your local Jazz scene.
You’re just as beautiful as you feel.
I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.
Your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’ So hush little baby don’t you cry.
A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!
My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often -in fact, mostly -at the expense of everything else in my life.
To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel.
[On Louis Armstrong] You cant play nothing on modern trumpet that doesnt come from him, not even modern shit. I cant even remember a time when he sounded bad playing the trumpet. Never. Not even one time. He had great feeling up in his playing and he always played on the beat. I just loved the way he played and sang.
To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.
I worked until I could play and do changes at any tempo in any key and said ‘What else is there?’ Now I’m finding out.
