Diane Schuurs

My career has been a combination of hard work and timing. Working with Stevie Wonder at the Kennedy Center Honors was timing. The Tonight Show was timing. Carnegie Hall, that was timing. My marriage was timing. I was ready, I wanted to know what it was like.

I wrote “Pilot of My Destiny” because of my love of flying. The fact that my brother is a pilot inspired me to write it. I call him pilot. He calls me copilot.

[on Frank Sinatra] He was a compassionate guy. He loved to have fun. He had a movie theatre in his house. We munched on popcorn and watched movies together.

I was always exposed to music. Mom and dad would have the radio on constantly.

It’s been quite a journey. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world!

Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz had been friends of mine, and I wanted to pay tribute to them.

Jazz music is the power of now.

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

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

Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don’t have to worry about anything.

In this trumpet I hear our icons and the sound of the future.

When you hear my lyrics, you hear the shots that I throw at people. I throw shots because I always been the underdog. I got rejected so many times, and I say it in my lyrics constantly.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

Jazz music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you absorb it.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

If a Jazz musician plays someone else’s song, he has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.