Mose Allison

Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph.

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

I’m trying to make music a sensual expression, not and academic experiment.

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.

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.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it. Blues was started by the slaves and I think everybody thinks that it all should be sad… even some of the slaves had fun with it.