Anita Baker

You leave home to seek your fortune and when you get it, you go home and share it with your family.

I started as a writer and when I sent my demos out everyone wanted to know who was singing and if that person wanted a record deal.

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Talent is only the starting point.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

Jazz is a music that allows a person to express his deepest, most personal self.

I write songs about real things… The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

I thought I had swell ideas and wonderful musicians but no one else did.

I never set out to find a style of my own, it just happened.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education… just talent.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that’s when I was born.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.

I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.