Alicia Keys

We are a gorgeous, infinite circle of women all shades, all styles, in all the ways we were made. Inside of us everything blooms.

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 subscribing to this sick identity. … Stay in your place, be feminine, be a lady, don’t make too much noise.

My wish for us all is to love and adore ourselves just as much as we do everyone else!

The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.

In the 80s, when I was a little girl, this whole Midtown area was a different world. These are the streets that I walked, and learned my lessons on, and heard the music, and witnessed disenfranchised people, and people who just had dreams and hopes. Every pimp, every prostitute, every drug dealer, every Broadway dreamer wishing they could be a writer, or a musician, or an actor.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

I’m gonna live till I die.

I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

For me, I started on a Les Paul and went through years of playing other guitars and just came back full circle to what was more natural to me.

People will always need love, romance, a tender touch and really personal and deeply felt music.

To work is to feel alive.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

I have younger friends who don’t work and they aren’t doing so well. My secret is to keep going, keep working.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

Jazz has always been a man telling the truth about himself.

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.