Nat King Cole

Only time, education and plenty of good schooling will make anti-segregation work.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

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

If I could read it, I could play it.

Critics don’t buy records. They get ’em free.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.

It’s part of what the blues does, to write about these things. JB Lenoir was the main one in this regard – he wrote about Korea, too, in fact. Songs that reflect these current situations – in his case, racial issues for the most part: in my case, what has happened to me, and I was in Korea.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Musicianship is using your two ears.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

Just allow your feelings to go with the music and you’ll find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Music opens up minds to dream great dreams about where you can go and what you can do.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.