Benny Goodman

You have to look good.

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.

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.

To this day, I don’t like people walking on stage not looking good. You have to look good. If you feel special about yourself then you’re going to play special.

Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.

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.

I am only a mixture of countless influences and thanks to that I am able to find my own style of playing.

If I don’t learn something new every day, it’s a day lost

Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.

It’s all music.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self- consciousness.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

It’s always Jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes she’s the same old broad.

There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

I don’t worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.