Let my children have music.
Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker’s next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?
In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.
Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.
Good Jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms and yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of Jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.
I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is ’cause I’m changing all the time.
Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.
Good music is good music and everything else can go to hell.
I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.
I’ve worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid there weren’t.
You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.
Dog spelled backward is God. That’s pretty heavy.
My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.
I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.
It’s easy to play any musical instrument, just touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.
I’m not thinking about what needs to be on the radio. I’m not thinking about anything other than – I’m just going to let this music come out of me and not have any sort of preconceived notion of what I should do. I’m just going to do it.
Jazz never ends… it just continues.
The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.
Count don’t do nothin’. But it sure sounds good.
In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.
