Buddy Rich

A musician starting out today should get a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument.

You only get better by playing.

I never believed in a set routine. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel.

I’m not like a legend that – so I’m sort of in the middle in this sort of gray area where, you know, I’m creating music, and I’m not saying there isn’t an audience, because there is; because all of those people go out and spend $80 to $150 on a concert ticket.

All this is saying is, OK I see now, the ‘hood does not quite want Shirley Bassey yet, so let me still give them this. Crack Music was made after Diamonds. After black people were like, ‘I don’t know about this one.’ It was like me reaching too high for the cookie jar.

Your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’ So hush little baby don’t you cry.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education… just talent.

Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

It’s easier to copy someone else than to find out how to avoid sounding like someone else.

It became a kind of a game, to remember the things that had happened five minutes ago. I would start making notes about the things I was doing, on an instrument that was foreign to me, the guitar, so it was just a fun way of doing cognitive therapy. I was none the wiser to it until I began to improve and my ability to speak began to come back.

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

I can count on one hand the number of instrumental hits there have been over the last 10 years.

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

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.

Play it f**kin’ loud!

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about Jazz and Blues.

Inspiration comes from tunes you play, other musicians and your own imagination.