A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.
Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.
Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited.
There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.
If you have a great band with a mediocre drummer, you have a mediocre band. If you have a mediocre band with a great drummer, you have a great band!
Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian.
Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven’t; there’s no proof of it.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.
There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!
You’ve got to find a way of saying it without saying it.
It doesn’t mean a thing if it doesn’t have that swing.
The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.
You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.
I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
People do not retire. They are retired by others.
Music is the tonal reflection of beauty.
By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.
There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.
There are two kinds of worries – those you can do something about and those you can’t. Don’t spend any time on the latter.