What we play is life.
If you have to ask what jazz is you will never know.” Louis Armstrong.
There’s some folks, that, if they don’t know, you can’t tell ’em.
The Bright Blessed Day, the Dark Sacred Night.
What is Jazz? Dude, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.
Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.
Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby – love. That’s the secret.
To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!
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.
It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics dope and all of that stuff. It is a thousand times better than whiskey. It is an assistant and a friend.
Each man has his own music bubbling up inside him.
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.
You got to love to be able to play.
A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original.
If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it.
All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.
We all do ‘do, re, mi,’ but you have got to find the other notes yourself.
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.