Louis Armstrong

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad. I play the good kind.

I don’t need words. It’s all in the phrasing.

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

I don’t really get nervous, I prepare. When the music messed up in the beginning, it tapped into my nerves and when you’re nervous and vulnerable, something special and something different can happen.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

That’s the beauty of music. They can’t take it from you.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

Music is the shorthand of emotion

Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.