What we play is life.
Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.
I don’t need words. It’s all in the phrasing.
Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.
Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.
There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.
Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?
If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.
When you hear somebody with balls, that’s me.
There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven’t yet done.
I don’t pop my cork for every man I see.
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know
Dog spelled backward is God. That’s pretty heavy.
The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.
People couldn’t give an F about how many cars you got any more. It’s about the way the music sounds, where you’re going, the experience you’re going to hanging out with your friends, the type clothes that you’re wearing – all of that’s art.
Jazz amounts to Blues, your unique sound and the elusive genius of improvisation.
I didn’t know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what knocked me out. Changes… man I dug.
I always make it a point to pick songs on which players really shine.
Inspiration comes from tunes you play, other musicians and your own imagination.
If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.
Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.
