Steve Winwood

I still do what I love, and I don’t really think about it. I try to make a beautiful show, so people go home happy. That’s my biggest aspiration: to make people happy.

I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

I was not prepared to play the role of singer in the camp of the warriors

I was probably six years old when I first sang before an audience.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

It’s very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he’s creating, the fact that he’s experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in a brotherhood of some kind… we’re in it together.

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.

I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.

Music to me is like breathing. I don’t get tired of breathing, I don’t get tired of music.

I never heard of a Jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so what are you going to do… play for the walls?

You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you’re really interested in it.

Indian music is very soulful and the only other school that develops improv to the high degree you find in Jazz.