Diane Schuurs

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

I met up with George Shearing about a year before my mother passed away. When I was 11 years old, Mama took me to the Edgewater Inn in Seattle and I was able to sit down and play piano for George and a lot of (the set list) was songs I had heard from the album, ‘Concerto For My Love.’ Then, after Mama died, my dad and I went to actually hear him perform at the Edgewater Inn when I was 12. Oh my gosh! It just really got me into playing piano.

Maybe the best is yet to come, but I’ve already had the best.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

I try to just be grateful for what I have, and not [focus on] the things that I don’t have.

I was determined to succeed in what I loved to do. I wasn’t going to let my disability stand in my way.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead

I write songs about real things… The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about, but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

Music is the shorthand of emotion

The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!

Music and life are all about style.

The fabulous places I’ve been, wonderful things that’ve happened, great people I’ve met ought to make a story.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

It is this tendency to play with manic enthusiasm on every possible occasion that distinguishes the amateur Jazz musician from the professional.

For me, music and life are all about style