Henri Matisse

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

Eliminating the piano means that I’ve always worked closer with the bass than most players.

Never play anything the same way twice.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else.

While many forms of music may use the dynamic of improvisation, Jazz exemplifies the unique characteristic of collective improvisation.

I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!

I don’t really get nervous, I prepare. When the music messed up in the beginning, it tapped into my nerves and when you’re nervous and vulnerable, something special and something different can happen.