Herbie Hancock

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

When I was coming up, I practiced all the time because I thought if I didn’t I couldn’t do my best.

Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

In the world of Art there are no wrong choices.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

When you hear my lyrics, you hear the shots that I throw at people. I throw shots because I always been the underdog. I got rejected so many times, and I say it in my lyrics constantly.

Never play anything the same way twice.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.

Jazz never ends… it just continues.

Les is an old friend of mine. He gave me this special white Les Paul – he wound the pickups himself – for my birthday, first time I met him. I play everything from heavy metal to blues to jazz on it. He just hit it right on the head when he designed the Les Paul. I like it better than most girlfriends I’ve had. The godfather of rock ‘n’ roll, I call him. Without him, none of us would have a job.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.