Herbie Hancock

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

Miles’ sessions were not typical of anybody else’s sessions. They were totally unique.

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

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

I think there’s a great beauty to having problems. That’s one of the ways we learn.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.

Through Dizzy and Bird I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I’m teeming with the drive to write.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

I feel like….Music is the – it’s the answer. It’s the reason.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

A drummer has to be kind-hearted.

I’m not a star. I’m just backing up the cats.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

A Jazz Diet will make you hipper, thinner, taller, smarter, richer, happier and more attractive to members of both sexes.