“Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.”

“it ain't as hard as picking cotton”

“Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape so...”

“The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two oclock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Loui...”

“I noticed that religion gave some people a way to escape dealing with the world: Things will be better when you die, the people of my grandmas generation said as they worked themselves to death. Go...”

“Jazz is democracy in music.”

“I have to return some videotapes”

“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public off...”

“...[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, a...”

“There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly. ”

“If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.”

“Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.”

“The music echoes in the emptiness. It reminds us where we came from and where were bound.”

“You got infinite channels and limitless rhymes, but the riddles of livin' stay undefined?”

“The music plays . . . and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream.”