Carmen McRae

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

Music isn’t just learning notes and playing them. You learn notes to play the music of your soul.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

I think music needs to be of its time and speak to that time.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.