Wes Montgomery

Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.

When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved.

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

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.

How are you going to know what’s new to play if you haven’t listened to everything that’s old?

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of Jazz.

I have a nice car, a Mercedes. And then I have an old El Camino truck that I’m crazy about. I like to get in that truck and go up in the hills near where I live, in Vegas, and take my camera. That, to me, is Heaven, being out in nature, taking pictures of the wildlife.

Jazz goes into my coffee in the morning, in my wine at night.

You can practice to learn technique, but I’m more interested in conceiving something in the moment.

You only get better by playing.

One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.