You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

I don't pay no attention to what critics say about me, the good or the bad. The toughest critic I got is myself...and I'm too vain to play anything I think is bad.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It's over; it's on the record.

The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them...I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.

Somebody, my daughter or my wife, gave me a music box for Christmas. It plays "My Funny Valentine" on celeste, you know? So I had Bobby [Irving] just play "Jean Pierre" with the changes on celeste.

I don't like to hear someone put down dixieland. Those people who say there's no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know.