Billy Taylor

Jazz is America’s classical music.

I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

The weird thing about bass is the simplest stuff to do is the hardest.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.

The Blues and Jazz will live forever. So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable. I feel its the only solution to that particular problem that I presented myself.

I listen to all kinds of songs. There’s something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it’s pop or jazz or hip-hop.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

Music is to the soul what water is to the body.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

I would like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.