Art Blakey

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.

[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.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

People will hire you and then tell you not to do what you were doing when they heard you.

When it comes to music, don’t lie to yourself; just tell yourself the truth.

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.

The louder they [the band] play the softer I sing.

I learn something new every day.

I wasn’t interested in practicing Bach; I was too busy digging Horace Silver!

In this trumpet I hear our icons and the sound of the future.

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

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

I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

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

I’m going to make music out of whatever style it is, being true to the artform itself.

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That’s what I try to do with my horn.