I cringed when I heard myself described as a Jazz singer. I’ve always thought of myself as a Jazz vocalist.
Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.
The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.
We never play anything the same way once.
In my world, the first thing I reach for is the sound.
Composing is a mindset, a part of who I am.
Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.
I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.
It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.
I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.
Give it a good go, try to have fun at it, try to pass on some good notes and some good sounds to your fans, and I don’t think you will have wasted your time.
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.
Let the music speak for itself.
From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. Its not. Its feeling.
There is nothing more stuntastic than rapping in front of an orchestra.
When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.
A Jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
Music is the only language in which you cannot say anything sarcastic.
To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.
Love is sweeping the country.
