If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much.

That's the clarinet I used to use... but it's just a piece of wood, you know, with holes in it and they put these clumsy keys on it and you're supposed to try to take that and manipulate it with throat muscles and chops... and try to make something happen that never happened before. And when you do, you never forget it. It beats sex, it beats anything.

I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to listen to it.

Listening to Benny [Goodman] talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music.

If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much.