Art Blakey

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

A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

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

We’re here to have a ball.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing.

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.

That’s the beauty of music. They can’t take it from you.

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

[on Glastonbury] I started off the show and I completely messed up the music. And me, as you can imagine by this phone call, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So it really put me into a slightly depressed state.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.

I’ve never thought the blues was a matter of copying other people. The blues singer should sing songs about his own life. And once the ball got rolling, I felt confident enough to do that as well as cover other people’s songs, and the tributes. You’ve got to think about representing your own life in the music, and for me that meant bringing in an element of jazz; I was brought up on jazz, it was my father’s work, it was in the house.

Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

I think you can play anything you wanna as long as you take the audience along with you.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He’s still a nice young man, only confused.

For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hr and they always tipped me at the end of the night.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all

The beauty of Jazz is that it’s malleable. People address it to suit their own personalities.

I can count on one hand the number of instrumental hits there have been over the last 10 years.