Benny Goodman

One way or the other, if you want to find reasons why you shouldn’t keep on, you’ll find ’em. The obstacles are all there; there are a million of ’em.

If a guy’s got it, let him give it. I’m selling music, not prejudice.

As soon as it was understood that we could handle things in our own way, it was the thrill of my life to walk out on that stage with people just hemming the band in.

Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments.

After you’ve done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.

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.

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off.

Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I’m using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I’m happy with that.

But the guitar, my lady, whether well played or badly played, well strung or badly strung, is pleasant to hear and listen to; being so easy to learn, it attracts the busiest of talented people and makes them put aside loftier occupations so that they may hold a guitar in their hands.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

It’s not what you do, but the way you’re doing it and in the end that’s all that we have.

Jazz has the ability to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles.

Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.

Jazz has such great feeling and emotional content it really doesn’t require technical understanding.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

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

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

I’m… a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective.