An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control..

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper... a windshield wiper that's fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an ….

Benny Goodman plays the clarinet. I play music..

Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijiana, and will expire on cocaine..

The bandleader is a musician trying to sell a mass commodity; and in order to do so successfully he must accommodate himself to mass standards. Unles….

Listening to Benny [Goodman] talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel..

It ["Begin the Beguine"] became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had. It was the first time that a so-called swing band ….

I'm not conditioned to be an entertainer. An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself. The problem with that is artists ….

An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away..

That's the clarinet I used to use... but it's just a piece of wood, you know, with holes in it and they put these clumsy keys on it and you're suppos….

If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much..

There's such a cynicism about the phrase 'I laughed all the way to the bank.' It's as though money is what you're doing, rather than playing music. I….

If you wanna dance, a windshield wiper'll do it-all you need is a beat..

You have no idea of the women I didn't marry..

The distance between me and Benny [Goodman], was that I was trying to play a musical thing, and Benny was trying to swing. Benny had great fingers; I….

I'm not comfortable with categories, and I distrust most definitions. The word 'definition' is based on the word 'finite,' which would seem to indica….

Essentially, the popular musician in America must learn that his basic job is to entertain people, to make them forget their sorrows for a moment or ….

I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to lis….

I can't understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out & look at it?.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself..

You run into a party and [a] woman comes up to you. She's the most beautiful creature you ever saw - Ava Gardner - and says, "I like you and why don'….