Bonnie Raitt

I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother’s aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others.

I don’t worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

Your horn is your passport to the world.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

Jazz has evolved with an inner necessity characteristic of any true art form.

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!

It’s not uncomfortable for me to be a sideman, but I feel more comfortable as a bandleader.

It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom and passion.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn’t have a choice.

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

While many forms of music may use the dynamic of improvisation, Jazz exemplifies the unique characteristic of collective improvisation.