Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!

I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King's son.

Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don't dance, or who never did dance, don't really understand the beat... I know musicians who don't and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.

Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.

I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.