Music is interior decoration.
The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.
I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!
A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?
Clouds float in the same pattern only once.
You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, ‘Yes, where are you going?’ And he says, ‘I want a ticket to nowhere.’ I thought: that’s it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.
Your humanity is your instrument.
Music opens up minds to dream great dreams about where you can go and what you can do.
I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.
There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven’t yet done.
People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.
If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.
Im believe that all people are in possession of what might be called a universal musical mind.
The Blues and Jazz will live forever. So will the Delta and the Big Easy.
The Blues is never old.
It’s easy to play any musical instrument, just touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
All that I’ve played, all that I’ve sung, I couldn’t have done any other way.
I don’t want to sing anything that doesn’t come real.
Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.
I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.
The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.
Three months. I was playing the organ for three months. It was a challenge for me in the beginning.
