Billy Taylor

Players are coming from other backgrounds: rock, folk, ethnic music. It’s changing Jazz for the better.

I only knew classical music, which to me was the only true music. The only way I could survive at the bar was to mix the classical music with popular songs, and that meant I had to sing. What happened was that I discovered I had a voice plus the talent to mix classical music together with more popular songs, which at the time I detested.

Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.

I didn’t know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what knocked me out. Changes… man I dug.

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

I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.

I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

Keeping your artistic self as creative as possible is a balancing act.