Louis Armstrong

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

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

What we play is life.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

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

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

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at Jazz.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

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.

We’re here to have a ball.

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

Man, you tell a story.

I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother’s aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others.