“Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.”

I do believe that my whole success goes back to that time I was arrested as a wayward boy at the age of thirteen. Because then I had to quit running around and began to learn something. Most of all, I began to learn music.

I warm up at home. I hit the stage, I’m ready, whether it’s rehearsal or anything.

What we play is life.

I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

Well, I tell you. the first chorus, I plays the melody. The second chorus, I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus, I routines.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

Music is life itself. What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is.

All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

I never want to be anything more than I am; what I don’t have, I don’t need.

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

The first time I heard Jack Teagarden on the trombone, I had goose pimples all over.

I have seen so many bands and musicians fade away, especially the ones in my early days that treated me and my bands with contempt for no other reason than that they were headlining the show, not all though, with great exceptions such as Slade and Vinegar Joe.

The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed.

If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won’t succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.

William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn’t quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician.

You can have all sorts of relationships, but there’s something with musicians working together where you can have relationship that can just continue to grow in a beautiful way.

You might have asked [about skill] of an artist or a musician or whatever… but with me it just happens.

Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments.

Laughing and crying are really similar – what happens to your body. It’s a very similar process in your diaphragm. Like a musician, you have to do your scales once in a while and warm up your voice.