Alanis Morissette

Breakups are a horrible thing for almost everybody I know. For someone who is a love addict, it’s debilitating.

And ultimately the people who produce my records, they know that they’re here to serve the purpose of me expressing who I am at this period of time and augmenting that or pulling it forward and I love that process.

For four to six months at a time, I would barely eat. I lived on a diet of Melba toast, carrots, and black coffee.

I think some fans want everything to stay they same because they want to stay the same.

It’s when someone has an agenda of their own for the record that it doesn’t work for me.

Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

You’ve got to be willing to put stuff on the line, otherwise it doesn’t have much meaning.

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I’m concerned with retaining that process.

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.

[On the word Jazz] There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s only a word. What’s in a name? Nothing! Cats say, Call me Muhammed so-and-so. But what’s the difference? A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music. Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

[On Louis Armstrong] You can’t play nothing on modern trumpet that doesn’t come from him, not even modern shit. I can’t even remember a time when he sounded bad playing the trumpet. Never. Not even one time. He had great feeling up in his playing and he always played on the beat. I just loved the way he played and sang.

The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still come to my concerts, still buy my CDs, I’ll keep playing until I feel like I can’t.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.