Jazz music is the real deal.
Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.
Apparently Jazz is now considered high art and the average person has trouble understanding it.
People who like Jazz feel the depth and soul and intelligence that the music expresses.
There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.
Jazz music is our original American culture.
The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.
The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!
I love songs that are very autobiographical.
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
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.
Miles Davis and John Coltrane were so cool, if alive today global warming wouldn’t be an issue.
You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.
As long as you’ve got your horn in your mouth, you’re developing.
I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.
In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. ThatÂ’s a little bit too much.
Jazz musician is a combination entertainer, poet, singer, educator, student, artist, seducer and all-round good fellow.
I like the interplay in the music.
The true beauty of music is that it connects people.
I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.
It was in tune when I bought it.
I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.
