Jazz stands for freedom.
There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.
It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.
Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.
My dream was to have a steady job, was not to be on the road, to exist like a guy that goes to work as a mechanic or a carpenter and knows he’s gonna have a job.
Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.
I never wanted this kind of life that I’m still living.
I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.
Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.
I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it’s about feeling more than being perfect.
For a long time I wasn’t listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty–it would bring back memories I didn’t want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I’m not alive ’cause I’m not making it. And if it was good, I hated it ’cause I wasn’t doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious ’cause I could’ve done it better…
Its all about finding the right note at the right place and knowing when to leave it alone.
You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.
To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.
Music is the shorthand of emotion
The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you’ve got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
A musician starting out today should get a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument.
I could write six songs in one day with everything that’s going on.
Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.
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.
I’ve been a jazz artist playing pop and R&B my entire career.
