“If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters & gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle~class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.”

If you’re sitting in that audience ready to fight me from the very beginning, I’m going to have a hard time getting to you. But if you’ve got a heart at all, I’m going to get it.

This is our culture, and I don’t care who the musician is, if he avoids black people, then he is scared of something. He doesn’t have confidence in himself or else he doesn’t believe in what he’s doing.

After me there are no more jazz singers . . . It’s a crime that no little singer is back there sockin’ it to me in my field. To keep it going, to keep it alive, because I’m not going to live forever.