“Once you discover that you can, then you must.”

The ones that you sing when you’re driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.

A couple of incidents of shortness of breath and checked myself into a hospital, but that one in France really sat me down for a few minutes.

Let that get you up in the morning and put the light in your eyes. I’m telling you, it makes you a better husband, mother, father, neighbor, citizen.

I discovered is that I have a couple of valves that were leaky and had been giving, gave me a problem then. But I hadn’t noticed anything up until then.

Every day is Thanksgiving for me, man. Yeah, I still have an audience, and they ask the local promoter, “When is Al coming back?”

It’s all background experience and listening and exposure.

I would still be singing, because it’s part of my heart and my soul, and it lifts me up.

and I was listening. I started singing, warmer than a summer night, at seven or eight years old.

I did a concert at five years old in the garden of one of the church members, and we raised some money to buy a new piano in our little church.

These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I’m washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles.

Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it’s not easy. You have to take direct steps.

Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career.

Every day is Thanksgiving.On this stage you’re going to hear God and none of them other words, and I ain’t going to touch my stuff.

I was age six or seven, and singing, “Jesus wants me for her son, beep, to shine for him,” and people smiled and pinched my cheeks till the blood vessels broke, and I knew I was doing something right.

Find something you would do for free.

I came here with something in me that I inherited from my folks. So I’m going to do something called life and times.

You have to enjoy playing. The old-timers did, and that’s one reason why their music is a lasting music. I feel that I play jazz to entertain the listener, and you just can’t do that unless you yourself are entertained at the same time.

The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity.

I never liked jazz or anything else. Early rock n’ roll – that was music to me. Everything else was boring.

That the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another themeM

I’ve been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

Jazz brought this sense of democracy where four guys come together and your name may be on the marquee, but in this moment, when you’re the soloist, it’s you, and we follow you. We follow you.

You have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the Blues.