Alicia Keys

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.

I never thought love could be so deep, so wide, so open, so full, so elevating! Such a teacher! Thank you for teaching me, growing me, deepening me!!

I constantly ask myself if what I’m doing is for me or somebody else. It’s tripping me out!

I believe in the limitlessness of humans. We’re capable of incredible things. At times that realization is frightening.

Love is real, love is pure, you only take what you give and give what you take. At its purest it is real. No pretending.

I’ve come into loving and understanding the feminine side of me. How powerful a woman and her femininity is… how strong, how graceful, how gorgeous, how beautiful. I love getting to know the many sides of myself. I embrace them all.

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents. There must be respect for the people that have gone before.

I’m a fan first. I believed Duke Ellington when he said there’s no bad music, just some of it is presented badly. As a kid, hanging around Church Street, the presentation of music was so powerful, I couldn’t help but jump for joy. I had discovered art, or truth, or whatever you want to call it; I had seen a light I’d follow forever.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

The first time I ever had to go overseas for music was to play the Royal Festival Hall in London, singing in a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, and that week was insane: Thursday I rehearse with the orchestra; Friday I sing two songs in front of 2,500 people, which I have never done before; and the next day I go to Abbey Road to record with Herbie Hancock; and then I am playing a pub in south London somewhere, and nobody cares because London have lost some sporting match; and then I go home and I’m standing in front of my washing machine, putting my unmentionables into the dryer, and in that instant, I just looked at myself and said ‘This life is going to be strange’.

Never lose the groove to find a note.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

Jazz musician is a combination entertainer, poet, singer, educator, student, artist, seducer and all-round good fellow.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

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.

My role as a drummer is as a team player to enhance what is going on around me.