Pete Fountain

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

If the audience doesn’t hear what is going on, is it going on?

I’m gonna live till I die.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

In Kansas City joints ran 9pm-5am. Pay was a $1.25 a night but somebody special like Count Basie could command $1.50.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

My singing evolved with a feeling of intense relaxation, always using my diaphram and breathing specifically through my nose.

I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.