Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

You can't make jazz without using certain elements of Latin music.

The sporting houses needed professors, and we had so many different styles that... it wouldn't make any difference that you just came from . . . whatever your tunes were over there, we played them in New Orleans.

Rejoice at the death and cry at the birth: New Orleans sticks close to the Scriptures.

I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don't even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style hell, they're all Jelly Roll style.

In the year of 1902, when I was about seventeen years old, I happened to invade one of the sections [in New Orleans] where the birth of Jazz originated from.

I do not claim any of the creation of the blues, although I have written many of them even before Mr. Handy had any blues published. I heard them when I was knee-high to a duck.