Music Quotes

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

I’m not playing for other musicians. We’re trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We’ll keep him happy.

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

Anyone who understands Jazz knows that you can’t understand it. It’s too complicated. That’s what’s so simple about it.

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don’t you ask him? And besides, maybe we’d all like to be like Miles, and just haven’t got the guts.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

I’ve had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

You know at an early age if you have a talent for music.

Nobody has ever been able to define Jazz satisfactorily. This is probably because anyone who was capable of doing so never really wanted to, knowing how much you would have to leave out of the definition.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. Some of it comes from books.