Billy Eckstine

I’m glad I don’t have perfect pitch because it can drive you crazy.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

You can’t sing about love unless you know about it.

When you want ’em you can’t get ’em, when you’ve got ’em, you don’t want ’em.

It’s spontaneity that has always characterized Jazz music’s finest improvisers.

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

I guess what everyone wants more than anything else is to be loved. And to know that you loved me for my singing is too much for me. Forgive me if I don’t have all the words. Maybe I can sing it and you’ll understand.

T-Bone was, to me, that sound of being in heaven.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

Know the business; you need to know the business side of things.

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.

I’m gonna live till I die.

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

I want to create music that’s therapeutic.

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.