Hubert Laws

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.

They always want to sell me as a hard bopper.

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.

Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.

I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

For me, there wasn’t a line between working and getting paid or simply playing for fun.

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

My improvisations are a beguiling mixture of the vertical and the horizontal.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn’t know how to read music is over.

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.