Billy Taylor

Players are coming from other backgrounds: rock, folk, ethnic music. It’s changing Jazz for the better.

I have always seen Jazz as innovative.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

Don’t give up trying to do what you really want. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

If the bass plays the root, a pianist superimposes a Maj7 built on the 5th and the sax plays the 13th, will hot women notice?

Music has to be accessible.

I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.

People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

[on B. B. King] Very seldom does he talks about the way he play, man. He always wanna talk about young women. And I fuss at him sometimes, I say, ‘Man I wanna know what did you do here!’

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still come to my concerts, still buy my CDs, I’ll keep playing until I feel like I can’t.

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

The true beauty of music is that it connects people.