Chuck Israels

Nothing is so well-prepared as a great spontaneous performance.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.

What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.

I play as I feel.

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.

I feel like….Music is the – it’s the answer. It’s the reason.

I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it’s about feeling more than being perfect.

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you’ve got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

Judy Garland was the singer I most wanted to sound like then, not to copy, but to get some of her soul and purity. A wonderful young voice.

You don’t know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.