Bobby McFerrin

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

Don’t worry, be happy!

I have a lot of albums yet to do.

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

The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.

Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.

Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

I remember Elvis as a young man hanging around the Sun Studios. Even then, I knew this kid had a tremendous talent. He was a dynamic young boy. His phraseology, his way of looking at a song, was as unique as Sinatra’s. I was a tremendous fan, and had Elvis lived, there would have been no end to his inventiveness.

No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

A lot of singers think all they have to do is exercise their tonsils to get ahead. They refuse to look for new ideas and new outlets, so they fall by the wayside… I’m going to try to find out the new ideas before the others do.

Never lose the groove to find a note.

Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

I’ve always liked the Freddie King/B. B. King rich tone, and at the same time, I like the manic Buddy Guy/Otis Rush Strat tone. So I’m always caught in the middle of the Gibson and Fender sounds. If I’m playing my black [Fender] Strat, and I’m in the middle of a blues, I kind of wish I was playing a [Gibson] Les Paul. Then again, if I was playing a Les Paul, the sound would be great, but I’d be saying, “Man, I wish I had the Stratocaster neck!”

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

The qualities in music I consider most important are beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity.