Oscar Peterson

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 play as I feel.

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

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.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

I have no one style.

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.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all

I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.

Everyone is working who should be.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

You only go around once and this ain’t no rehearsal.

Rather than say I play Jazz, I simply say I play music.

Don’t bullshit, just play.

A Jazz performance centers upon the process of creation. The final objective is not only the finished product, but the path and process taken towards it.

I wasn’t so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That’s why I’m broke.

Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.