To work is to feel alive.
Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.
One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.
I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.
If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.
It’s not what you do, but the way you’re doing it and in the end that’s all that we have.
There’s so much music out there and so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.
To keep creating you have to be about change.
Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!
Jazz is the sound of surprise.
Jazz musicians are the only workers who will put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.
I love it. When they stop imitating me then I’ll start wondering where I’m going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.
Jazz is a work in progress. We’ll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years.
In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.
It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.
You have to understand the styles and it’s good to study those that came before us.
Music isn’t just learning notes and playing them. You learn notes to play the music of your soul.
There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.
The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.
I don’t know what they’re thinking about. Just because someone says, ‘I like what you do’ or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I’ve had that experience with record companies.
