Once when asked how I would like to be remembered, I answered, “As someone who opened doors.
Your mother’s heartbeat is the first sound you ever hear and your own heartbeat is the last.
When I was first aware that I couldn’t read music I didn’t know I couldn’t read because I could play the music that was in front of me.
What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.
When things are going well, I hate to quit.
Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.
The secret of a great melody is a secret.
Most of the international acceptance of jazz education can be traced to the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, and the wonderful program they inaugurated.
The first choral music I remember hearing was Handel’s ‘Messiah’ when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast it over the radio.
If there’s a deadline, I work late. If not, I like to have normal hours, and get up early and work. When things are going well, I hate to quit. And then I’ll work ’till exhausted.
Jazz stands for freedom.
It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me. And also it’s to me the greatest instrument. I shouldn’t say that, but I believe that this is the only instrument I can really feel happy about playing.
I never wanted this kind of life that Im still living.
I played a lot of sports and it’s the plays in basketball that weren’t worked out that are the ones that are just fantastic that you remember. We don’t know the power that’s within our own bodies.
Concord, California was a great place to grow up.
I knew even if I’m a cowboy, I’m going to be involved in jazz in some way.
I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.
I used to take my mother to Yosemite. When I turned 14, I got my driver’s license, and that’s where she’d want to go, so I’d go take her there for two weeks.
I was always very aware of drummers. My oldest brother Henry was a drummer, and he drummed on everything in the house from the kitchen sink to stovepipes. He was the first drummer in the Gil Evans Orchestra, so you’ve got to know how great he was.
You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.
No dictatorship can tolerate jazz. It is the first sign of a return to freedom.