Oscar Peterson

I play as I feel.

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 don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.

I don’t believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

I do the best I can with any instrument I get attracted to. But they’re just tools in order for you to express yourself and that’s really the upshot of it.

I saw a vibraphone for the first time and knew immediately I had found my means of expression.

The guitar chose me.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

After two takes you’re imitating yourself.

I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.

For me, I started on a Les Paul and went through years of playing other guitars and just came back full circle to what was more natural to me.

I’m still searching even today for a sound, like the guy that’s searching for a home. I haven’t been able to find that completely. I’m satisfied at times with the sound of my guitar… but it is a little sound that I hear but I can’t tell anybody about it. I don’t know how. But if I ever get it, I’ll know.

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

I’ve always had a deep love of live performance, it’s when I feel most alive.