Louis Armstrong

Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

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

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

You blows who you is.

Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.

There’s so much music out there and so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.

The whole concept for the Yeezus album is that we’re not going to be using CDs in the future and since this is the last time we’re going to see it, this is an open casket for the CD.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

As long as musicians have passion for spontaneity and creating something that’s never been before, Jazz will flourish.

In the world of Art there are no wrong choices.

The point of Jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

While many forms of music may use the dynamic of improvisation, Jazz exemplifies the unique characteristic of collective improvisation.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I’ve heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn’t swinging.

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.

Your sound is you and what you really feel inside.