Ray Brown

I went up to his [Hank Jones’] house and there were four guys there: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach. Not a bad place to be. Scared shitless, but a nice place to be on my second day in New York.

Jazz is a complete lifestyle, something that you feel, something that you live.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.

It’s part of what the blues does, to write about these things. JB Lenoir was the main one in this regard – he wrote about Korea, too, in fact. Songs that reflect these current situations – in his case, racial issues for the most part: in my case, what has happened to me, and I was in Korea.

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.

It’s not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

I’ve noticed that the more adventurous and in that mode that I am, it seems that the more the audience really likes it.

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

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.

Play for the spiritual aspect, the emotion.

I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.

My singing evolved with a feeling of intense relaxation, always using my diaphram and breathing specifically through my nose.

It’s spontaneity that has always characterized Jazz music’s finest improvisers.

Jimmy (Wakely) told me, ‘I don’t want you to sound so much like Dinah Washington.’ So, I thought, ‘How can I get around this?’ And one of the people I really dug was Patti Page. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to sound like her.’ I actually did with a couple curly-cues thrown in for effect, but, that’s how I started getting away from the predominant Dinah influence, and getting my own style together.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven’t yet done.