Herbie Hancock

The true artform is being a human being.

I’m always interested in looking forward toward the future. Carving out new ways of looking at things.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.

Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference.

I’m always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I’ve also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

I cringed when I heard myself described as a Jazz singer. I’ve always thought of myself as a Jazz vocalist.

I came from an era when we didn’t use electronic instruments. The bass wasn’t even amplified. The sound was the sound you got.

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

As far as music school goes, I walked through Berkelee one time.

I haven’t a great Jazz band and I don’t want one.

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.

If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

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.’

Good music is good music and everything else can go to hell.

The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.

I met up with George Shearing about a year before my mother passed away. When I was 11 years old, Mama took me to the Edgewater Inn in Seattle and I was able to sit down and play piano for George and a lot of (the set list) was songs I had heard from the album, ‘Concerto For My Love.’ Then, after Mama died, my dad and I went to actually hear him perform at the Edgewater Inn when I was 12. Oh my gosh! It just really got me into playing piano.

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.