Ahmad Jamal Quotes

[Jazz] interpreted the works of composers such as the Gershwins or Irving Berlin beyond their wildest dreams. Take the pianist Art Tatum; most of the body of work he did wasn't his own music, and yet it was totally his. That's a process that has allowed what is called jazz to add so much to the world's culture. Look at the Juilliard School, the New England Conservatory, institutions that wouldn't have thought of teaching Louis Armstrong – now Louis Armstrong is teaching them, they all have jazz departments, and they teach kids from all over the world.

Miles, Thad Jones, Clark Terry, Gil Evans, myself—the reason we always stay young is because we've been part of three eras. We heard Lunceford, Hines, Basie at their peak--I was a sponge, I absorbed that era. Then it was the Gillespie-Parker era—we were still young, and again we sponged it up. Now we are living in the electronic age . . . and we're still listening.

Years ago, when I was growing up and bands like Basie and Ellington came to the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, where I was born, they were called entertainers. You can hardly use that word today, when men like Max Roach and Jackie McLean have tenure as professors at major American colleges.

[When asked how he practiced] With the door open, hoping that someone would drive down my street in a big luxurious car and hear me! [...] I was never the practitioner in the sense of 12 hours a day, but I always thought about music. I think about music all the time.

[On maintaining high levels of energy into old age] It's a divine gift, that's all I can tell you [...] We don't create, we discover – and the process of discovery gives you energy

Performing is like being the matador in a bullring. You have to be constantly concerned about what you're doing or you get gored.

I always tried to divest myself of the music business. I wasn’t too thrilled with the music business at any time [...] So I have always sought to do other things.

If you're applying for credit and write that you’re an insurance salesman, or a member of the Chicago Symphony, you won't have trouble. But just write "jazz musician" and you can't even buy a sofa on credit.

"I do things differently," he asserts. "I put it down to my parents, and to being raised in Pittsburgh, which is unique. I was delivering papers to Billy Strayhorn's family when I was seven years old. It was Mary Lou Williams's town, Kenny Clarke's, Art Blakey's, Earl Hines's, Roy Eldridge's, George Benson's, Stanley Turrentine's, Earle Wilde [sic], the exponent of Liszt, Maxine Sullivan, Loren Mazel [sic] the conductor. My father was an open-hearth worker in the steel mills, but they got me playing the piano when I was three years old.

It was 25 cents here, $6 there. At $6, one gets to thinking it's a lot of money. So then economics started dictating the direction of my career, and that's when I started devoting more time to jazz. When I got up to $60 a week, which was as much as my father was making, I said, well, this is it. And I was doing that before I left high school.

I listened to music from Tatum and Erroll Garner to Mozart. I've composed since I was 10 years old – I used to do 20% my own pieces and 80% other people's; now it's turned the other way. After a certain time you discover the Mozart in you, the Duke Ellington or Billy Strayhorn in you. It takes time to discover yourself. You also have to find and keep players who are in tune with what you're doing; you have that empathy, the quality of breathing together.

When I pass a piano anywhere, I have to touch it or play it.

When 1 was 7, my mother arranged for me to take piano lessons. They cost one dollar a lesson. She was a domestic. She walked to work to save that dollar.

[On querying the permanent use of the word "jazz"] So was the word Negro ! Yet you hardly hear it anymore—it's now Afro-American or black. All sorts of linguistic changes are going on: Instead of chairman we now say chairperson in order to upgrade the position of women in our society. Jazz is an important-enough area of our culture to demand constant refinement.

I once heard Ben Webster playing his heart out on a ballad [...] All of a sudden he stopped. I asked him, "Why did you stop, Ben?" He said, "I forgot the lyrics." That's what Nat (King) Cole was talking about, "You have learn to live with a song."