Joe Venuti

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

I just fell in love with the integrity of the music and that was it.

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can’t ‘not’ be a musician.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

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

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say anything sarcastic.

Dizzy used to tell me I’m playing too hard. He’d say to not give everything. Miles told me that too.

I sing like I feel.

You’ve heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better’n I can, play the blues better’n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.