“Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.”

When the band plays fast, you play slow; when the band plays slow, you play fast.

In high school I was best in music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

If you’re going to drop behind, you have to keep it there.

My future starts when I wake up every morning.

There are no wrong notes.

When kids don’t learn about their own heritage in school, they just don’t care about school… But you won’t see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it – like, they say “rock”. Because the white singers can’t sound like James Brown, they call him “soul”. They’ve been doing that for years. That’s the prejudice crap.

Jazz musicians are so comfortable. The reason they can’t do what we do is because they’re so comfortable doin’ what they do.

First you imitate, then you innovate.

That’s the way women do. The frown. They want to give you the attitude to approach them back, by giving you a negative vibe.

Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!

Always listen for what you can leave out.

My father’s rich, my momma’s good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I’ve never suffered and don’t intend to suffer.

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

With Fred McDowell, I just love the way he articulates the notes. I’m hardly unique in that, but there’s just something about that that I love.

Notes don’t make music until you learn to insert silence between them.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?

In the best possible scenario, whenever you get notes from people, they’re good notes, and they see things that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and they make you a better writer.

If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.

It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.

There are no wrong notes.

There is more value in placing a flower in a rifle barrel than making war. As Jimi Hendrix used to say, musical notes have more importance than bullets.