I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.
Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen and be over eighteen.
A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life.
I’m a musician at heart, I know I’m not really a singer. I couldn’t compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.
I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.
Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!
If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.
What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.
Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.
Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.
Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.
I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.
Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.
I was a singing disc jockey who heard every type of music there was – and loved it all.
Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.
Always keep reaching.
I cant understand these guys who just have to have your autograph. I asked one of them What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?
Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.
I have always seen Jazz as innovative.
Jazz singing is like pornography. You can’t say what it is, but you know it when you see it.
You can’t explain Jazz to anyone without losing the experience because it’s feeling, not words.
