Art Blakey

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

We’re here to have a ball.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

I’m… a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective.

The true beauty of music is that it connects people.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

I’ve always had a deep love of live performance, it’s when I feel most alive.

I think you have to leave a lot to the imagination!

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.

I worked until I could play and do changes at any tempo in any key and said ‘What else is there?’ Now I’m finding out.

So until we see you again, bright moments and keep searchin’ for your mystery note on the universal piano of life.

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

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.