“I usually write from the rhythm section…If a drummer got a funky beat on some things – like a half-shuffle or a shuffle or a backbeat that’s even – I can write something.”

Music is an addiction.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.

My ego only needs a good rhythm section.

Do not be afraid of errors. There are no errors.

Drummers – sometimes they play and they listen. And that little listen takes a speck away from the right tempo.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes – There are none.

White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything – you know what I mean?

People will go for anything they don’t understand if it’s got enough hype.

You can’t compete with Sweets’ sound and time feel. It’s impossible.

We’re not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got ’em, so they can keep ’em.

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

I never thought that the music called “jazz” was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

Americans don’t like any form of art, man. All they like to do is make money. They don’t like me, Sammy Davis, or anybody else. They don’t like nothing. They just like Sammy because he can make ’em a lot of money.

I can’t write anything for myself. I can write when I hear like [John] Coltrane play something; I used to write chords and stuff for him to play in one bar. I can write for other people, but I don’t never write for myself.

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.

I’m crazy about James Brown. I’m crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.

The Righteous Brothers were purely rhythm and blues, black music.

And I like messing around in the engine room of music. Seeing what happens in the rhythm section area.

We are adjusters. We empathize, we change rhythm and above all we listen to our fellow actors-if they’re good actors.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn’t there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can’t.

I love feeling the rhythm of other people’s lives. It’s like traveling.

I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat.

Every thing and every human action revolves in rhythm.