Quotes on Jazz

Technically, I'm not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

"Music, for me, has always been a place where anything is possible--a refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together, and anything can happen. We are limited only by our imaginations.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Making money ain't nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you're just as graveyard dead as he is.

You can cage the singer but not the song.

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 always say that the problem with jazz accessibility is not the content of the music, it's people's ability to access it.

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how to play.

When they say 'jazz,' I'm thinking of a word called 'the creative process.' It intersects every vein and tributary, avenue, path, that everyone's living. It crosses through there, but it's been contained.

Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.

Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.

It isn't where you came from, its where you're going that counts.

The beauty of jazz is that it can accommodate all styles. You can take jazz and put rock in it, and it's still jazz.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music from life.