Oscar Peterson

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

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

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

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.

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’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’m always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

Jazz is like wine. When it is new it’s only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.

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

You’re just a little too hip for the room. It’s not good to be too hip because two hips make an ass.

Musicians tell me, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.

I loved Billie Holiday more than any other person other than myself on the stage.

Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.

Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing very powerful emotions. That’s what draws people towards it.

You gotta mean it and you gotta treat it gentle.

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

When you sing, always tell the truth.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.