Jay McShann

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

Surrender your whole being to a note and gravity disappears.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He’s still a nice young man, only confused.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

Inspiration comes from tunes you play, other musicians and your own imagination.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

Talk of God is most often in church. Is there a God outside of church? I hope so. But how should I know? How does anybody know?

Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that it’s almost as if it’s intertwined with society.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.