Kevin Eubanks

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

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

As long as I can say what it is that I need to say, then I’ll fit whatever I’m trying to say around a melody.

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz.

Using drugs didn’t help me play, all it did was hang me up for 15 years.

I never set out to find a style of my own, it just happened.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

I think Ive done the best I could have done. But I keep wanting to play better, go further. There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I havent yet done. When I was younger I thought maybe Id reached that peak. But Im 86 now, and if I make it through to next month, Ill be 87. And now I know it can never be perfect, it can never be exactly what it should be, so you got to keep going further, getting better.

The sound of the orchestra is one of the most magnificent musical sounds that has ever existed.

Jazz goes into my coffee in the morning, in my wine at night.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often -in fact, mostly -at the expense of everything else in my life.

I didn’t get my music together until I was 40.

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.