George Gershwin

Life is a lot like jazz. It’s best when you improvise.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

When you want ’em you can’t get ’em, when you’ve got ’em, you don’t want ’em.

I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

Music allows the great opportunity to play with people you love.

When I heard T-Bone, I flat out lost my mind.

Jazz music is haunted by its own hungry ghosts.

Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.

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

There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.

Everything I’ve ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

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

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.