Mose Allison Quotes

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

I already experimented with free jazz in the 1960s and, in my opinion, to play free jazz, you have to be a perfect musician and a perfect human being - and none of us are!

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

Whatever it is, music should sound spontaneous, I've derived a great deal of pleasure from playing jazz and having the knowledge of that spontaneity.

I was trained in jazz, which I love.

Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden!

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

Jazz changes and all. But I don't know the names of what it is I'm doing.

If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

I think that the jazzy approach that I have is based on the way that I hear music and in the way I play a supporting role to the other people in the band.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

Even though the music I make gathers influences from all over the place, I feel that the core of what I do comes from the jazz tradition. In terms of improvisation, interaction, feel and overall concept, Jazz is my main source of information and inspiration.

If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about.

I suppose technically I could say I'm based in jazz, just because it's the school of thought that I've been encouraging myself to operate within.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.

I think jazz is a wonderful learning tool.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.