Alicia Keys

Kindness, love, strength and determination personified!! Madiba reminds me that everything is possible!

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

How incredible our ancestors were. The first astrophysicists, scientists, physicians, mathematicians, architects, creators of so much of the world as we know it. It’s a blessing to know what cloth you’re cut from!

I’m meant to be an artist who can stand on my own. That’s my place; that’s what I’m supposed to do.

To all my goddesses in the world spreading love and light, power and radiance. Never stop being brilliant!!

My wish for us all is to love and adore ourselves just as much as we do everyone else!

I write songs about real things… The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

Three months. I was playing the organ for three months. It was a challenge for me in the beginning.

Never play anything the same way twice.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was 6 years old.

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.

A Jazz performance centers upon the process of creation. The final objective is not only the finished product, but the path and process taken towards it.

It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

That’s where I heard feedback first – from Les Paul. Also vibratos – even before B.B. King, you know. I’ve traced a hell of a lot of rock and roll, little riffs and things, back to Les Paul – it’s all there. I mean, he’s the father of it all: multi-tracking and everything else. If it hadn’t been for him, there wouldn’t have been anything really.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s just that when you’re playing, Stephane, you’ve got both Chaput and me backing you, but when I’m soloing I’ve only got one guitar behind me!

[on Django Reinhardt] This was a man who changed my musical life by giving me a whole new perspective on the guitar and, on an even more profound level, on my relationship with sound…During my formative years, as I listened to Django’s records, especially songs like ‘Nuages’ that I would play for the rest of my life, I studied his technique. Even more, I studied his gentleness. I love the human sound he gave his acoustic guitar.