I was minding my own business when something says to me, "you ought to blow trumpet." I have just been trying ever since.

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

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.

Sometimes [playing free] doesn't happen, because maybe a guy's wife'll come in, you know, and his ego will catch him. If everybody's completely just straight-without any old ladies over here, a fourth of whisky over there; if it's balanced right, it'll come off. It has to be. But when you get egos involved with playing free, you can't do it.

If you had to call it "unison", it ain't unison. It ain't the same as somebody else. If you can hear that it's unison, and you have to name it something other than "unison", it ain't unison, you know what I mean? It's two guys playin', but one guy is playin' slightly out of tune, one is playin' slightly off meter.

He sounded to me like he's supposed to be the savior of jazz. Sometimes people speak as though someone asked them a question. Well, no one asked him a question.