The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.
Those little nimble musicians of the air that warble forth their curious ditties with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.
Comedy is like music and the way to make the best music is to have skilled musicians in your band.
Put you energy into music. If it fails you you can become an accountant or a dentist. And then if you become a dentist or an accountant it's too late to become a musician afterwards.
We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.
But recently I began to feel that maybe I wouldn't be able to do what I want to do and need to do with American musicians who are imprisoned behind these bars music's got these bars and measures you know.
From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.
Music is emotional and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.
I used to go to Bourbon Street when I was a kid and there would be club after club after club of people who were around when the music started. I mean these are legendary maybe not so well known but legendary musicians.
It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers like Frank Sinatra and myself we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written we go back to the greatest songs.
We're musicians. We make music for a living. It's that simple. Nothing else matters.
The bottom line is that musicians love to make music and always will.
Musicians are there in front of you and the spectators sense their tension which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.
A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music and you provide the silence.
Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.